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CTURES: 


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By Joseph Cook 






One volume izmo, uniform with th 


is volume. $1.50. 
Biology," by the same 

Publishers. 


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Boston Monday Lectures. 



TRANSCENDENTALISM, 



WITH 



PRELUDES ON CURRENT EVENTS. 



By JOSEPH COOK. 



'* They who reject the testimony of the self-evident truths will find 
nothing surer on which to build." — Aristotle. 




BOSTON: 
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY. 

(Latb Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co.) 
1878. 

On 



■ C 7 



at: LIBRARY 
Qg CONGRESS 

WAWNOTOM 



Copyright, 1877, 

By JOSEPH COOK. 

All Rights Reserved. 



FRANKLIN PRESS: 

RAND, AVERY, AND COMPANY, 

BOSTON. 



INTRODUCTION. 



The object of the Boston Monday Lectures is to present the 
results of the freshest German, English, and American scholar- 
ship on the more important and difficult topics concerning the 
relation of Eeligion and Science. 

They were begun in the Meionaon in 1875 ; and the audiences, 
gathered at noon on Mondays, were of such size as to need to be 
transferred to Park-street Church in October, 1876, and thence to 
Tremont Temple, which was often more than full during the 
winter of 1876-77. 

The audiences contained large numbers of ministers, teachers, 
and other educated men. 

The thirty-five lectures of the last season.were stenographically 
reported in the Boston Daily Advertiser, and most of them were 
republished in full in New York and London. 

The lectures on Biology oppose the materialistic, and not the 
theistic, theoiy of Evolution. 

The lectures on Transcendentalism contain a discussion of the 
views of Theodore Parker. 

The Committee having charge of the Boston Monday Lectures 
for the coming year consists of the following gentlemen : — 



His Excellency A. H. Rice, 
Governor of Massachusetts. 

Hon. Alt-heus Haedt. 

Hon. WnxiAM Claelen, Ex- 
Governor of Massachusetts. 

Prof. E. P. Gocld, Newton The- 
ological Institute. 

Rev. J. L. Wetheow, D.D. 

Reuben Cuooke. 

Rev. Welleoi M. Baker, D.D. 

Russell Stcegis, Jr. 

E. M. McPherson. 

Boston, September, 1877. 



Prof. Edwards A. Paek, LL.D., 
Andover Thelogical Seminary. 

Rignt Rev. Bishop Fostee. 

Prof. L. T. Townsend, Boston 
University. 

ROBEET GrLCHEIST. 

Samuel Johnson. 
Rev. Z. Gray, D.D., Episcopal 
Theological School, Cambridge. 
William B. Merrlll. 
M. H. Sargent. 
M. R. Deming, Secretary. 

Henry F. Durant, Chairman. 



PUBLISHEBS' NOTE. 



In the careful reports of Mr. Cook's Lectures printed 
in the Boston Daily Advertiser, were included by the 
stenographer sundry expressions (applause, &c.) indicat- 
ing the immediate and varjing impressions with which the 
Lectures were received. Though these reports have been 
thoroughly revised by the author, the publishers have 
thought it advisable to retain these expressions. Mr. 
Cook's audiences included, in large numbers, representa- 
tives of the broadest scholarship, the profoundest philoso- 
phy, the aeutest scientific research, and generally of the 
finest intellectual culture, of Boston and New England ; 
and it has seemed admissible to allow the larger assembly 
to which these Lectures are now addressed to know how 
they were received by such audiences as those to which 
they were originally delivered. 




CONTENTS. 



LECTURES. 

PAGE 

I. Intuition, Instinct, Expeeiment, Syllogism, as 

Tests of Tbuth 1 

N[I. Transcendentalism in New England .... 27^ 

III. Theodore -Parker's Absolute Religion ... 53 

IV. Caricatured Definitions in Religious Science 83 
V. Theodore Parker on the Guilt of Sin . . . 109 

VI. Final Permanence of Moral Character . . 135 

VII. Can a Perfect Being permit Evil ? . . . . 165 
VIII. The Religion required by the Nature of 

Things 191 

IX. Theodore Parker on Communion with God as 

Personal 219 

X. The Trinity and Tritheism 247 

XI. Fragmentarlness of Outlook upon the Divine 

Nature 277 

PRELUDES. 

PAGE! 

I. The Children of the Perishing Poor. ... 3 

II. The Failure of Strauss' s Mythical Theory . 29 

III. Chalmers's Remedy for the Evils of Cities . 55 

TV. Mexicanized Politics 85 

V. Yale, Harvard, and Boston Ill 

VI. The Right Direction of the Religiously Ir- 
resolute 137 

VII. Religious Conversation 167 

VIII. George Whitefield in Boston 193 

IX. Clrce's Cup in Cities 221 

X. Civil Service Reform 249 

XI. Plymouth Rock as the Corner-Stone of a 

Factory 279 



INTUITION, INSTINCT, EXPERIMENT, SYLLOGISM, 
AS TESTS OF TRUTH. 

THE FIFTY-NINTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC- 
TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE, JAN. 1. 



" He would "be thought void of common sense who asked on the 
one side, or, on the other, went to give, a reason why it is impossible 
for the same thing to he and not to he." — Locke: Essay, Book i. 
chap. iii. 

"There is here a confession, the importance of which has been 
observed neither by Locke nor his antagonists. In thus appealing 
to common sense or intellect, he was in fact surrendering his thesis, 
that all our knowledge is an educt from experience. For in ad- 
mitting, as he here virtually does, that experience must ultimately 
ground its procedure on the laws of intellect, he admits that intellect 
contains principles of judgment, on which experience being depend- 
ent, cannot possibly be their precursor or their cause. What Locke 
here calls common sense he elsewhere denominates intuition." — 
Sir William Hamilton: Reid's Collected Writings, vol. ii. p. 784. 



TEANSCENDENTALISM. 



INTUITION, INSTINCT, EXPERIMENT, SYL- 
LOGISM, AS TESTS OF TRUTH. 

PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. 

Unless the children of the dangerous and perish- 
ing classes are to blame for being born, they, at least, 
whatever we say of their parents, cannot be shut out 
from a victorious place in our pity. This is a festal 
day ; and, if the Author of Christianity were on the 
groaning earth to make calls, probably the most of 
them, in the cities of the world, would be in unfash- 
ionable places. Why should we be so shy of the 
visitation in person of death-traps and rookeries ? 
There is ineffable authority and example for going 
from house to house doing good. Visits thus en- 
joined cannot be made by proxy. No doubt organ- 
ized and unorganized charity is usually, in its modern 
form, a result of the Christian spirit. Celsus said 
Christianity could not be divine, because it cared 
insanely for the poor. Old Rome's mood toward the 
miserable the world of culture now loathes. Philan- 
thropy swells the tide of commiseration for the un- 

3 



4 TEANSCENDENTALISM. 

fortunate ; and sometimes the most erratic opinions 
have been conjoined with the soundest behavior 
toward those who have hardly where to lay their 
heads. Orthodoxy itself is often shy of personal con- 
tact with the very wretched, and goes from house to 
house by proxy. Organized charity, we think, is the 
whole of our duty. But Thomas Guthrie, and Dr. 
Chalmers, and all who have had much to do with 
the perishing classes in great cities, have taught the 
Church, that, when men are sick and in prison, they 
are to be visited. I know a great orator in this city, 
whose name is a power from sea to sea, and whose sil- 
vering honored head often bends over couch and 
cradle in the most miserable houses. It is safe to go 
to the North End now : it is not safe in the fiercest 
heats of summer. 

Our North winds in winter strike us all the way 
from Boothia Felix, and their iciness seals some 
fever-dens, whose doors swing wide open every sum- 
mer under the guardianship, as one must suppose, of 
the negligence of the Board of Health. [Applause.] 
I am not speaking at random ; for, according to the 
city reports, there were in 1876 sixty-eight houses 
condemned as not conforming to the sanitary regula- 
tions of this city ; and of these only seventeen were 
realty vacated; the rest were white-washed. [Ap- 
plause.] The truth is, that if there were ten Boards 
of Health, and if they all did their duty, we could 
not avoid having a large population born into the 
world miserable. 

This nation now has one-fifth of its population in 



TESTS OF TRUTH. O 

cities. What are we to do with the social barriers 
which allow a great city to be not only a great 
world, but ten great worlds, in which one world does 
not care at all for what the other worlds are doing ? 

In every great town there are six or ten strata in 
society ; and it is, one would think, a hundred miles 
from the fashionable to the unfashionable side of a 
single brick in a wall. Superfluity and squalor know 
absolutely nothing of each other — such is the utter 
negligence of the duty of visiting the poor, in any 
other way than by agents. I do not undervalue 
these, nor any part of the great charities of our 
times ; but there is no complete theory for the per- 
manent relief of the poor without personal visitation. 
Go from street to street with the city missionary or 
the best of the police ; but sometimes go all alone, 
and with your own eyes see the poor in the attics, 
and study the absolutely unspeakable conditions of 
their daily lives. Not long ago, I was in a suffocated 
tenement-house where five or six points on which I 
could put my hand were in boldest violation of the 
laws which it is the business of the Board of Health 
in this city to see executed. [Applause.] The 
death-rate of Boston in summer, in the North End, 
is often above thirty-five in the thousand. The regis- 
trar-general of England says that any deaths above 
seventeen in a thousand are unnecessary. Live one 
day where the children of the perishing poor live, 
and ask what it is to live there always. I know a 
scholar of heroic temper and of exquisite culture, 
who recently resolved to live with the poor in a 



6 TKANSCENDENTALISM. 

stifling part of this city, and who, after repeated and 
desperate illness, was obliged to move his home off 
the ground in order to avoid the necessity of putting 
his body underground. You cannot understand the 
poor by newspapers, nor even by novels. 

Our distant lavender touches of the miserable 
show the barbaric blood yet in our veins. Going 
about from house to house doing good is a great 
Christian measure permanently instituted by a typi- 
cal example, which in a better age may be remem- 
bered, and be the foundation of a nobility not yet 
visible on the planet. There was One who washed 
his disciples' feet, and in that act founded an order 
of nobility; but this second symbolic act seems not 
to be apprehended even yet by some good Samari- 
tans — in gloves. The way from Jerusalem to Jeri- 
cho lies now through the city slums ; and, for many 
an age to come, there will be the spot where men 
oftenest will be left stripped and sore and half dead. 
We want all good influences of the parlor and press, 
from literature and the interior church of the church, 
to work upon the problem of saving the perishing 
and dangerous classes in great cities. [Applause.] 

Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are, 
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, 
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, 
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you 
From seasons such as this? Take physic, pomp; 
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, 
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, 
And show the heavens more just. 

Lear, act iii. sc. iv. 
[Applause]. 



TESTS OF TRUTH. 



THE LECTURE. 

Napoleon L, one day riding in advance of his army, 
came to a bridgeless river, which it was necessary 
that his hosts should immediately cross on a forced 
march. " Tell me," said the great emperor to his 
engineer, " the breadth of this stream." — " Sire, I can- 
not," was the reply. " My scientific instruments are 
with the army ; and we are ten miles ahead of it." 
— " Measure the breadth of this stream instantly." — 
" Sire, be reasonable." — " Ascertain at once the width 
of this river, or you shall be deposed from your office." 
The engineer drew down the cap-piece on his helmet 
till the edge of it just touched the opposite bank ; 
and then, holding himself erect, turned upon his 
heel, and noticed where the cap-piece touched the 
bank on which he stood. He then paced the dis- 
tance from his position to the latter point, and turned 
to the emperor saying, " This is the breadth of the 
stream approximately ; " and he was promoted. 
Now, in all the marches of thought, metaphysical 
science measures the breadth of streams with scien- 
tific instruments, indeed; but it uses no principles 
which men of common sense, at their firesides, or in 
politics, or before juries, or in business, do not recog- 
nize as authoritative. Your Napoleon's engineeer, 
after his instruments came up, no doubt made a more 
accurate measurement than he had done by his skil- 
ful expedient of common sense ; but the new and 
exact determination of the distance must have pro- 
ceeded upon precisely the same principle by which 



8 . TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

he had made his approximate calculation. Both the 
estimates would turn on the scientific certainty that 
the radii of a circle are equal. The distance to the 
opposite bank is one radius in a circle, of which the 
position of the observer is the centre ; and, if now he 
wheels round the radius, of course the radius here is 
just as long as the radius yonder ; for things which 
are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. 
The most exact instruments ever invented would 
have behind them only that incontrovertible, axio- 
matic, self-evident truth. You can measure a river 
in the way Napoleon's engineer did ; but you think 
that research of the metaphysical sort has something 
in it incomprehensible, mystical, and suspicious. Let 
us not stand in too much awe of the theodolite. As 
the engineer's final measurement of the river with 
scientific instruments was simply his pacing made 
exact, so metaphysics is simply common sense made 
exact. 

After three months on Evolution, Materialism, and 
Immortality, the current of discussion in this Lec- 
tureship enters on a. new vista ; but the river is the 
same, for it flows out of that tropical land of Biology 
we have been traversing together, and the chief 
theme is always the relations of religion and science. 
It will yet be our duty to meditate on the applica- 
tion of the principle of evolution to philosophy, and 
especially to ethics; for I am now bidding adieu to 
Materialism as a topic, and am approaching Tran- 
scendentalism, and so Conscience, and so the natural 
conditions of the peace of the soul with itself and 



TESTS OF TEUTH. 9 

with the plan which inheres in the nature of things ; 
that is, with God. 

Here, as everywhere, religions science, like every 
other science, asks yon to grant nothing but axio- 
matic trnth. In considering Transcendentalism, or 
axiomatic tests of certainty, I must seem, therefore, 
to be almost transcendentalistic at first ; for such is 
and must be all sound thought, up to a certain point. 
I am no pantheist ; I am no individualist ; I am no 
mere theist, I hope : but so far forth as Transcen- 
dentalism founds itself upon what Aristotle and 
Kant and Hamilton have called intuition, self-evident 
truths, axioms, first principles, I am willing to call 
myself a transcendentalist, not of the rationalistic, 
but of the Kantian, Hamiltonian, and Coleridgian 
school. 

Both wings of the army front of Transcendental- 
ism must be studied, and it will be found that it is 
only the left or rationalistic wing that has been of 
late thrown into panic. That serried and scattered 
and very brave host made bold marches in Boston 
thirty years ago. Its leaders now confess that it has 
been substantially defeated. It is time for the right 
wing and centre to move. This portion of Transcen- 
dentalism never broke with Christianity: the other 
portion did ; and to-day, according to its own admis- 
sion, is not only not victorious, but dispirited (Froth- 
ingham, Transcendentalism in New England, passhri). 
Its historians speak of it as a thing of the past. Self- 
evident truths, axioms, necessary beliefs, however, 
can never go out of fashion; they can be opposed 



10 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

only by being assumed ; they are a dateless and eter- 
nal noon. 

Mr. Emerson's theoretical tests of truth are the 
intuitions or axioms of the soul, and undoubtedly 
these are the tests which the acutest philosophical 
science of the world now justifies, and has always 
justified. Whether the tests themselves justify pan- 
theism, whether they give countenance to individ- 
ualism like Mr. Emerson's, whether they establish 
mere theism, are grave and great questions that can- 
not be discussed here and now, but which we shall 
reach at the proper time. The whole of metaphys- 
ics, the whole philosophy of evolution, the whole of 
materialism, the whole of every thing that calls itself 
scientific, must submit itself to certain first truths ; 
and therefore, on these first truths we must fasten 
the microscope with all the eagerness of those who 
wish to feel beneath them, somewhere in the yeasting 
foam of modern speculation, a deck that is tremorless. 

What is an intuition? 

Theodore Parker held that we have an " instinc- 
tive intuition " of the Divine Existence, and of 
immortality, and of the authority of the moral law. 
He constantly assumed that these facts are intuitive 
or self-evident, and as incontrovertible as the propo- 
sition that every change must have an adequate 
cause. He used the word u intuition " carelessly, and 
did not carefully distinguish intuition and instinct 
from each other. Very often, in otherwise brilliant 
literature, this vacillating and obscure use of the 
word "intuition" leads to most mischievous confu- 



TESTS OF TRUTH. 11 

• 

sion of thought. We are told that woman's intui- 
tions are better in many respects than man's ; we are 
assured that the intuitions of childhood are purer, 
clearer, or more nearly unadulterated, than those of 
middle life : in short, our popular, and many of our 
scientific discussions, so far as these proceed from 
persons who have had no distinctively metaphysical 
training, use the word "intuition" with the most 
bewildering looseness. Individualism is justified by 
intuition; pantheism, mere theism, orthodoxy, or 
whatever a man feels, or seems to feel, to be true, he 
says his intuitions affirm. There are those who con- 
fuse intuition, not only with instinct, but with mere 
insight; that is, with an imaginative or reflective 
swiftness or emotional force, which, by glancing at 
truth, catches its outlines better than by laborious 
plodding. The loftiest arrogance of individualism 
justifies itself often simply by calling its idiosyncra- 
sies intuitions. In all ages mysticism of the devout- 
est school has frequently made the same wild mis- 
take. Gleams of radiance across the inner heavens 
of the great poetic souls of the race we must rever- 
ence ; but shooting-stars are not to be confounded 
with the eternally fixed constellations. Undoubted- 
ly a single flash of lightning from the swart, thunder- 
ous summer midnight, often ingrains the memory of 
a landscape more durably on the memory than the 
beating of many summer noons ; but even lightning 
glances are not intuitions. 

Our first business then, my friends, will be to ob- 
tain a distinct definition of the strategic word " intui- 



12 TEAtfSCMDENTALISM. 

tion." This is a scientific technical term ; and, when 
correctly used as such, has outlines as clearly cut as 
those of a crystal. 

"We must approach the definition in a way that 
will carry all minds with us, step by step. 

1. It is possible to imagine all the articles in this 
room to be annihilated, or not in existence. 

You feel very sure, do you not, as you cast a 
glance on the capacities of your mind, that you can 
believe that these articles might never have existed ; 
and so of all other objects that fill space ? Orion 
flames in our skies now; but you can at least imagine 
that this constellation might never have been. The 
Seven Stars we can suppose to be annihilated. I do 
not mean that we can prove matter to be destructi- 
ble, but that we can imagine its non-existence. You 
are entirely certain of your mental capacity to im- 
agine the non-existence of any material object in any 
part of space. 

2. It is impossible to imagine the space in this 
room to be annihilated, or not in existence. 

Notice the strange fact that you cannot so much 
as imagine the annihilation of a corner of the space 
in this room. You bring down in thought the space 
from one corner, as you would roll up a thick cur- 
tain ; but you have left space behind, up yonder in 
the corner. You lift up this floor and bring down 
the ceiling : but you have left space beneath and 
above. You draw in all four sides of this temple at 
once, and cause its dimensions to diminish equally in 
every direction ; but in every direction you have left 



TESTS OF TRUTH. 13 

space. If you go out into infinite space with the best 
exorcism of your magic, if you whip it as Xerxes 
whipped the ocean, you will find your heaviest lashes 
as unavailing as his. No part of space can even be 
imagined not to be in existence. We cannot so much 
as imagine that the space through which Orion and 
the Seven Stars wander should not be ; by no possi- 
bility can you in thought get rid of it, although you 
easily get rid of them. That is a very curious fact 
in the mind. 

3. It is possible to suppose all the events since sun- 
rise not to have taken place. 

I know not but that at this moment the English 
fleet lately in the Bosphorus is floating across the 
purple ripples of the Piraeus harbor at Athens, in 
sight of the Acropolis. It may be that the Russians 
are commencing a march upon Turkey. But what- 
ever has happened since sunrise I can imagine not 
to have happened at all. It is perfectly easy for me, 
in thought, to vacate all time of all events. Any 
thing that has taken place in time may be imagined 
not to have taken place. We can imagine the non- 
existence of whatever we call an event. 

4. It is impossible to suppose any portion of the 
duration from sunrise to the present moment not to 
have existed. 

If you will try the experiment with yourselves, 
and analyze your minds, you will find that it is really 
impossible to think of any portion of duration as 
annihilated. You annihilate an hour, as you say ; but 
there is a gap left, and it is an hour long. You anni- 



14 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

hilate an age in the flow of the eternities, and there 
is a gap of an age there. If you will simply notice 
your own thoughts, you will find that in this case, as 
in the case of space, we strike upon a most marvellous 
circumstance. The mind is so made, that it is not 
capable even of imagining the non-existence of time 
or of space. . There are hundreds of proofs of this ; 
and those who hold the materialistic philosophy do 
not deny the existence of this necessity in the human 
mind. They explain its origin and meaning in a way 
that I do not think clear at all ; but they, with all 
men who understand their own mental operations, 
admit that all events and all objects we may annihi- 
late in thought, but not space, not time. Moreover, 
we are convinced that always there was space, and 
always there will be ; that always there was time, 
and always there will be. 

5. It is possible to believe that any effect or 
change that has taken place might not have taken 
place. 

6. It is impossible to believe that any change can 
have taken place without a cause. 

This latter is an amazing but wholly incontroverti- 
ble fact in the mind. 

Our idea of the connection of cause and effect is 
equally clear with our ideas concerning space and 
time ; and the axiom which asserts that every change 
must have a sufficient cause is not a merely identical 
proposition either. I know that materialistic schools 
in philosophy are often saying that most axioms are 
simply equations between different expressions for 



TESTS OF TRUTH. 15 

the same thought. Whatever is, is. That, undoubt- 
edly, is an identical proposition. It means simply, as 
John Stuart Mill said, that, when any proposition is 
true in one form of words, we have a right to affirm 
the same thing in any other form of words. But 
take an axiom which is not an identical proposition, 
and that is admitted even by materialists not to be 
one : the proposition that the equals of equals are 
equal to each other. (See Baix, Professor A., 
Mental and Moral Science, English edition, p. 187.) 
You feel perfectly sure about that ; you cannot be 
made to believe that that is not true. Take the prop- 
osition, that every change not only has, but must have, 
an adequate cause, and that is by no means an iden- 
tical proposition. What is beyond the verb there 
does not mean only what that does which is on the 
first side of the verb. An identical proposition is 
simply an equation ; what is on the left side of the 
verb means just what that does which is on the right 
of the verb. But in the proposition, that every 
change has and must have an adequate cause, th'ese 
words on the right of the verb do not express just 
the meaning of the words on the left ; and yet you 
are perfectly sure of the connection between these 
two phrases. Not only lias, but must, you and all 
men put in there ; and you are sure about that vast 
double assertion. For all time past, and all time to 
come, that is an axiom, you say, not only for this 
globe, but for the sun, and the Seven Stars, and 
Orion. You are sure about that truth ; and, if you 
try ever so skilfully, you cannot make yourself 



16 TKANSCENDENTALISM. 

believe but that every change must have an adequate 
cause ; and yet, if you try to prove that proposition, 
you cannot do it by any thing that does not assume 
it. It is not only evident : it is self-evident. It is 
not evident through any other truth. It is a primi- 
tive and not a derivative truth. It is a first truth. 
Nevertheless, although there is no demonstration of 
that proposition, except by looking directly on it, or 
the supremest kind of demonstration, — absolute men- 
tal touch, — you are sure that it is true not only here, 
but everywhere; not only now, but forever. [Ap- 
plause.] 

7. The ideas of space and time are called in phi- 
losophy necessary ideas. 

8. The belief in the connection of cause and effect 
is called in philosophy a necessary belief. 

9. All real axioms are necessary truths. 

10. All necessary truths are not only evident, but 
self-evident. 

You may say that the proposition that it is two 
thousand feet from here to the gilded dome yonder 
is evident, but not that it is self-evident. You ascer- 
tain the distance by measurement and reasoning. 
But it is self-evident that the shortest distance be- 
tween this point and that is a straight line. On that 
proposition you do not reason at all ; and yet you 
are unalterably sure of it. 

11. Self-evident and necessary truths are univer- 
sally true ; that is, everywhere and in all time. 

We feel sure that it is, always was, and always will 
be true that a whole is greater than a part, and that 



TESTS OF TRUTH. 1? 

the sums of equals are equals ; that a thing cannot 
be and not be at the same time and in the same 
sense. We are confident that these laws hold good 
here, and in Orion, and everywhere. 

We arrive thus at an incisive definition : — 

12. An intuition is a truth self-evident, necessary, 
and universal. 

It is a proposition having these three traits, — self- 
evidence, necessity, and universality. 

13. Since Aristotle, these three have been the 
established tests of intuitive truths. (See Sir Wil- 
liam Hamilton's celebrated Note A, Appendix to 
Reid's Works.} 

14. An intuition is to be distinguished from an 
instinct. The latter is an impulse or propensity 
existing independent of instruction, and prior to 
experience. 

15. An intuition is to be distinguished from in- 
sight, emotional, reflective, or poetic. 

16. An intuition is to be distinguished from inspi- 
ration or illumination, sacred or secular. 

17. In scientific discussion any use of the word 
" intuition " to denote other than a proposition 
marked by self-evidence, necessity, and universality, 
is a violation of established usage. 

18. The supreme question of philosophy is wheth- 
er the self-evident, necessary, and universal truths of 
the mind are derived from experience, or are a part 
of the constitution of man brought into activity by 
experience, but not derived from it, nor explicable by 
it. Do these self-evident truths arise a priori, or a 



18 teanscendentalism:. 

posteriori ; that is, do they exist before or only after 
experience ? 

Up to this point we are all agreed, and we have 
attained distinctness, I hope, as to our fundamental 
term. From this point onward we may not all 
agree ; but I must venture these further proposi- 
tions : — 

19. This fundamental question has a new interest 
on account of the recent advances in philosophy, and 
especially in biology. 

20. These advances, if the German as well as the 
English field is kept in view, favor the d priori or the 
intuitional school. 

On one point there is no debate any longer ; namely, 
that there are certain truths which are not only evi- 
dent, but self-evident ; which are absolutely necessary 
beliefs to the mind ; and which are, therefore, univer- 
sal, both in the sense of being explicitly or implicitly 
held by all sane men, and in that of being true in all 
time and in all places. (See Mill's admissions pas- 
sim, in his Examination of Hamilton's Philosophy.) 
Immanuel Kant instituted a great inquiry,you remem- 
ber, as to the origin of this particular class of truths, 
especially of those which are not identical proposi- 
tions; and now I beg leave to ask this audience 
whether it is not worth while for us — now that Ger- 
many has gone back to Immanuel Kant, and dares 
to-day build no metaphysical superstructure except 
on his foundations or their equivalents — to ask over 
again, in the light of all the recent advances of bio- 
logical science, the supreme question : Are the self 



TESTS OF TRUTH. 19 

evident, necessary, and universal ideas of the mind 
derived solely from experience, or are they a part of the 
original furniture of the soul, not derived at all from 
sensuous impressions ? [Applause.] 

I am quite aware that Mr. Frothingham of New- 
York City, who in philosophy seems to have very 
little outlook beyond the North Sea, says that the 
Transcendentalism of which he is the historian has 
for the present had its day. Here is his graceful 
book ; and, although it is only a sketch, there is 
large meaning between its lines in its plaintive under- 
tone of failure. This coast of New England the 
Puritans made mellow soil for all seeds promising re- 
ligious fruitfulness. Transcendentalism rooted itself 
swiftly here for that reason ; but the effort was made 
to bring up that seed to the dignity of a tree without 
any sunlight from Christianity. Mr. Frothingham 
says the attempt has failed. I believe the seed, if 
it had had that light, might have lived longer. 
[Applause.] Let it never be forgotten that there are 
two classes of those who revere axiomatic truth, — 
the Kantian, Hamiltonian, and Coleridgian on the one 
side, and the purely rationalistic on the other. Mr. 
Frothingham says New-England Transcendentalism 
deliberately broke with Christianity; but in that 
remark he overlooks many revered names. 

His own school in Transcendentalism was indeed 
proud to shut away from the growth of the seeds of 
intuitive truth the sunlight of Christianity. No oak 
has appeared in the twilight ; but does this fact prove 
that the tree may not attain stately proportions if 



20 TKANSCENDENTALISM. 

nourished by the noon ? Already axiomatic truth is 
an oak that dreads no storms ; and forests of it to-day 
stand in Germany, watered by the Rhine, the Elbe, 
and the Oder; and one day similar growths will 
rustle stalwart in New England, watered by the 
Mystic and the Charles ; and the stately trees will 
stand on the Thames at last, in spite of its grimy 
mists. [Applause.] There will be for Intuitionalism 
in philosophy a great day, so soon as men see that 
the very latest philosophy knows that there is a soul 
external to the nervous mechanism, and that materi- 
alism must be laid aside as the result simply of lack 
of education. [Applause.] 

21. The positions of Kant, Sir William Hamilton, 
and Coleridge, and not those of the rationalistic wing 
of Transcendentalism, are favored by the researches 
of the most recent German philosophy. 

22. As materialism and sensationalism assert, there 
is in the spiritual part of man nothing which was not 
first in the physical sensations of the man. 

23. Leibnitz long ago replied to this pretence by 
his famous and yet unanswered remark : There is 
nothing in the intellect that was not first in the sen- 
sations, except the intellect itself. (Nihil est in intel- 
lects quod non fuerit in sensu, nisi ipse intellectus. 
— Leibnitz, Nouveau Essais.^) 

24. It is now proved that the soul is a force exter- 
nal to the nervous mechanism, and that the molecular 
motions of the particles of the latter are a closed 
circuit not transmutable into the activities of the 
former. 



TESTS OF TRUTH. 21 

25. We know now, therefore, that, besides what furni- 
ture sensation and association give to the soul, there are 
in us, wholly independent of experience, the soul and 
the plan of the soul. [Applause.] 

26. Of this plan, which must be the basis of all 
philosophy relating to man, the self-evident, necessary, 
and universal truths, or the intuitions on the one 
hand, and the organic or constitutional instincts on 
the other, are a revelation. 

27. Every organic instinct must be assumed to have 
its correlate to match it. 

28. Every really intuitive belief must be held to be 
correct. [Applause.] 

Proof that there is a soul is proof that there is a 
plan of the soul. 

It is now a commonplace of science that the uni- 
versality of law is incontrovertible. If the soul has 
an existence, it has a plan, for the universality of law 
requires that every thing that exists should have 
a plan ; and, if the soul exists, there is no doubt a 
plan according to which it was made, and according 
to which it should act. 

When, therefore, we prove that the soul is some- 
thing different from matter, or that it is as external 
to the nervous system as light to the eye, and the 
pulsations of the air to the ear ; when physiological 
science, led by the Lotzes and Ulricis and Beales, 
asserts that the soul is possibly the occupant of a 
spiritual body ; or when, not going as far as that, we 
simply say there is a soul, — we affirm by implication 
that it is made upon a plan. In the light of the best 



22 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

biological science of our day, it is incontrovertible 
that we have in man two things at least that did not 
originate in his senses ; namely, the soul and the plan 
of the soul. [Applause.] That is not a proposition 
of small importance. It means that these necessary 
beliefs, these self-evident truths, these first principles, 
inhere in the very plan of our soul ; and that they are, 
therefore, a supreme revelation to us from the Author 
of that plan. 

Self-evident truths thus take hold of the roots of 
the world. If, now, I raise the question whether 
instinctive beliefs, whether the first truths, which 
Aristotle said no man could desert and find surer, 
whether self-evident propositions, are not made self- 
evident of necessity by the very structure of our 
souls, you will not think I am running into mysti- 
cism, will you? You believe there is a soul, and 
you hold that every thing is made on a plan; or 
that from the eyelash that looks on Orion, up to 
Orion itself, there is no escape from the universality 
of law: therefore, you must hold, that, since every 
thing is made on a plan, the soul itself is. Just as 
you know that your hand was not made to shut 
toward the back, but toward the front, you know 
that the soul is made according to a certain plan. 
If we can find out that plan, we can ascertain what 
is the best way in which to live. It is said we can 
know nothing ; but do we not already know that there 
is a best way to live, and that it is best to live the 
best way, as assuredly as we know that our hand 
was not made to shut toward the back, but toward 



TESTS OF TRUTH. 23 

the front ? I think I know that [applause] in spite 
of all the wooden songs of materialism. 

Germany yet listens to Immanuel Kant, and to 
those who, succeeding him with the microscope and 
scalpel, have carried biological knowledge far beyond 
its state in his time, and are now asserting not only 
the existence of the soul, and its independence of the 
body, but that, because law is universal, the soul 
must be made on a plan ; and that, therefore, the 
supreme question of moral science and intellectual 
philosophy, and of all research that founds itself on 
mere organism, must be to ascertain what the plan 
of the soul is, in order that, through a knowledge of 
the plan, we may learn to conform to it. [Ap- 
plause.] 

What, then, must philosophy to-day call the su- 
preme tests of truth ? 

/in the ceiling of this temple will you imagine a 
great circle to be drawn, and will you call one quar- 
ter of it Intuition, another quarter Instinct, another 
Experiment, another Syllogism? Let our attempts 
at arriving at certitude all consist of endeavors to 
rise to the centre from which all these arcs are drawn. 
If you will show me what the intuitions are, and do 
that clearly, I can almost admit that you may strike 
the whole circle from simply a knowledge of that 
quadrant. I know, that, if you can inductively deter- 
mine any curve of the circle, you can then determine 
deductively the whole. But, my friends, we have 
seen too many failures in this high attempt to de- 
scribe the circle of the universe by determining three 



24 TEASTSCENDENTALISM. 

points only. No doubt through any three points a 
circle may be drawn; but so vast is the circle of 
infinities and eternities, that our poor human com- 
passes cannot be trusted, if we use one of these 
quadrants only. Let us be intuitionalists, but much 
else. Let us test quadrant by quadrant around the 
whole circle of research. Let us conjoin the testi- 
mony of Intuition, Instinct, Experiment, and Syllo- 
gism. Show me accord between your quadrant of 
Intuition and your quadrant of Instinct, and be- 
tween these two and the quadrant of Experiment, — 
this latter is the English quarter of the heavens, and 
that of Intuition is the German, — and between 
these three and the quadrant of Syllogism ; and, with 
these four supreme tests of truth agreeing, I know 
enough for the cancelling of the orphanage of Doubt. 
I know not every thing ; but I assuredly can find a 
way through all multiplex labyrinths between God 
and man, and will with confidence ascend through the 
focus of the four quadrants into God's bosom. [Ap- 
plause.] 

Archbishop Whately said, that, the wider the circle 
of illumination, the greater the circle of surrounding 
darkness. Acknowledging that this is true, we shall 
be devoutly humble face to face with inexplicable 
portions of the universe. Nevertheless, let us, with 
the faith of Emerson, with the insight of Theodore 
Parker, with the acuteness of John Stuart Mill, as 
well as with the deadly precision of Kant, and of all 
clear and devout souls since the world began, hold 
unalterably, in this age of unrest and orphanage, 



TESTS OF TRUTH. 25 

that, if these four quadrants agree, we may implicitly 
trust them as tests of truth. [Applause.] The su- 
preme rules of certitude were never more visible 
than in our distracted day; and they are Intuition, 
Instinct, Experiment, Syllogism. Each is a subtle 
verification of every other. Let us image these vast 
quadrants of research as so many gigantic reflectors 
of a light not their own. At the focal point of the 
four, Religious Science, strictly so called, lights its 
immortal torch. [Applause.] 



TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 

THE SIXTIETH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LECTURE- 
SHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE JAN. 8. 



" ^rjfiri d'ovnore na/mav anoTCkvrat rjv riva TtolTuol 
Aaol (jrrjiuCovoi' deog vv tlq earl nal airrjP 

Hesiod: Works and Days. 

"Let us do what we can to rekindle the smouldering, nigh 
quenched fire on the altar. The remedy is first soul, and second 
soul, and evermore soul." — Emeeson: Address at Cambridge, July 
15, 1838. 



n. 



TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENG- 
LAND. 

PEELUDE ON" CTTREEOT EVENTS. 

A SEEIOUS man must rejoice to have Christianity 
tested philosophically, historically, and in every great 
way, but not in a certain small, light, and inwardly 
coarse way, of which the world has had enough, and 
is tired. Yesterday the most scholarly representative 
of what calls itself Free Religion told Boston that 
the Author of Christianity is historically only an 
idolized memory inwreathed with mythical fictions. 
Will you allow me to say that the leading universi- 
ties of Germany, through their greatest specialists in 
exegetical and historical research, have decisively 
given up that opinion ? Thirty or forty years ago it 
was .proclaimed there in rationalistic lecture-rooms 
very emphatically : to-day such lecture-rooms are 
empty, and those of the opposing schools are 
crowded. On the stately grounds of Sans Souci, 
where Frederick the Great and Voltaire had called 
out to the culture of Europe, " Ecrasez Vinfame ! " 
King William and his queen lately entertained an 

29 



30 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

Evangelical Alliance gathered from the Indus, the 
Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, the Thames, and the 
Mississippi. Histories of the rise and progress and 
decline of German Rationalism, and especially of 
the power of the Mythical Theory, have been appear- 
ing abundantly for the last fifteen years in the most 
learned portions of the literature of Germany. The 
incontrovertible fact is, that every prominent German 
university, except Heidelberg, is now under predomi- 
nant evangelical influences. Heidelberg is nearly 
empty of theological students. Lord Bacon said 
that the best materials for prophecy are the unforced 
opinions of young men. Against twenty-four theo- 
logical students at rationalistic Heidelberg there 
were lately at evangelical Halle two hundred and 
eighty-two ; at evangelical Berlin two hundred and 
eighty ; and at hyper-evangelical Leipzig four hun- 
dred and twelve. 

Before certain recent discussions and discoveries 
on the field of research into the history of the origin 
of Christianity, the rationalistic lecture-rooms were 
crowded, and the evangelical empty. It is notorious 
that such teachers as Tholuck, Julius Miiller, Dorner, 
Twesten, Ullmann, Lange, Rothe, and Tischendorf, 
most of whom began their professorships at their 
universities with great unpopularity, on account of 
their opposition to rationalistic views, are now par- 
ticularly honored on that very account. (See ar- 
ticle on the " Decline of Rationalism in the German 
Universities," Bibliotheca Sacra, October, 1875.) 

We often have offered to us in Boston the crumbs 



TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 31 

from German philosophical tables; and, although I 
must not speak harshly, the truth must be told, 
namely, that the faithful in the uneducated ranks of 
scepticism — I do not deny that there are vast 
masses of Orthodoxy uneducated also — are not 
infrequently fed on cold remnants swept away with 
derision from the scholarly repasts of the world. If 
you will open the biography of David Friedrich 
Strauss, by Zeller, his admiring friend, and a profess- 
or at Heidelberg, you will read these unqualified 
words : " Average theological liberalism pressed 
forward eagerly to renounce all compromising asso- 
ciation with Strauss after he published the last state- 
ment of his mythical theory." (See Zeller, Pro- 
fessor Eduard, " Strauss in his Life and Writings" 
English translation, London, 1874, pp. 135, 141, 
143.) It did so under irresistible logical pressure, 
and especially because recent discoveries have car- 
ried back the dates of the New-Testament literature 
fifty years. 

Thirty years ago it used to be thought that the 
earliest date at which the New-Testament literature 
can be shown to have been received as of equal 
authority with the Old was about A.D. 130 ; but, as 
all scholars will tell you, even Baur admitted that 
Paul's chief Epistles were genuine, and were written 
before the year 60. This admission is fatal to the 
mythical theory put forth by Strauss when he was a 
young man, and now for twenty years marked as 
juvenile by the best scholarship of Germany. These 
letters of Paul, written at that date, are incontro- 



32 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

vertible proof that the leading traits of the charac- 
ter of the Author of Christianity, as given in the 
so-called mythical Gospels, were familiar to the Chris- 
tian world within twenty-five years after his death 
(Thayer, Professor J. Henry, of Andover, Boston 
Lectures, 1871, p. 372). There is now in the hands 
of scholars incontrovertible evidence that even the 
Gospels had acquired authority with the earliest 
churches as early as A.D. 125. Schenkel, Renan, 
Keim, Weizsacker, and others widely removed from 
the traditional views, teach that the Fourth Gospel 
itself could not have appeared later than a few years 
after the beginning of the second century. (See 
Fisher, Professor George P., Essays on the Su- 
pernatural Origin of Christianity, 1870, Preface, p. 
xxxviii.) These discoveries explain the new atti- 
tude of German scholarship. They carry back the 
indubitable traces of the New-Testament literature 
more than fifty years. They shut the colossal shears 
of chronology upon the theories of Baur, Strauss, 
and Renan. They narrow by so much the previously 
too narrow room used by these theories to explain 
the growth of myths and legends. Strauss demands 
a century after the death of Paul for his imaginative 
additions to Christianity to grow up in. It is now 
established that not only not a century, but not a 
quarter of a century, can be had for this purpose. 
The upper date of A.D. 34, and the lower date of 
A.D. 60, as established by exact research, are the two 
merciless blades of the shears between which the 
latest and most deftly-woven web of doubt is cut 



TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 33 

in two. [Applause.] There is no room for that 
course of mythical development which the Tubingen 
school describes. As a sect in biblical criticism, this 
school has perished. Its history has been written in 
more than one tongue (Thayer, Professor J. 
Henry, Criticism Confirmatory of the Gospels, Boston 
Lectures, 1871, pp. 363, 364, 371). 

Chevalier Bunsen once wrote to Thomas Arnold 
this incisive exclamation : " The idea of men writing 
mythic histories between the time of Livy and Taci- 
tus, and Saint Paul mistaking such for realities ! " 
Arnold's Life, Letter cxliv.) Paul had opportunity 
to know the truth, and was, besides, one of the bold- 
est and acutest spirits of his own or of any age. 
Was Paul a dupe f [Applause.] 

But who does not know the history of the defeat 
of sceptical school after sceptical school on the 
rationalistic side of the field of exegetical research ? 
The naturalistic theory was swallowed by the mythi- 
cal theory, and the mythical by the tendency theory, 
and the tendency by the legendary theory, and each 
of the four by time. [Applause.] Strauss laughs 
at Paulus, Baur at Strauss, Kenan at Baur, the hour- 
glass at all. [Applause.] " Under his guidance," 
says Strauss of Paulus (New Life of Jesus, English 
translation, p. 18), "we tumble into the mire; and 
assuredly dross, not gold, is the issue to which his 
method of interpretation generally leads." " Up to 
the present day," says Baur of Strauss (Krit. JJnters. 
iiber die canonische Evangel., 121, 40-71), "the mythi- 
cal theory has been rejected by every man of educa- 



34 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

tion." And yet New- York lips teach it here in 
modern Athens ! [Applause.] " Insufficient," says 
Eenan of Baur (Etude d'Hist. Bel., 163), " is what he 
leaves existing of the Gospels to account for the faith 
of the apostles." He makes the Pauline and Petrine 
factions account for the religion, and the religion 
account for the Pauline and Petrine factions. " Criti- 
cism has run all to leaves," said Strauss (see Zeller, 
Life of Strauss, p. 143) in his bitter disappointment 
at the failure of his final volume. 

Appropriately was there carried on Richter's cof- 
fin to his grave a manuscript of his last work, — a 
discussion in proof of the immortality of the soul : 
appropriately might there have been carried on 
Strauss's coffin to his grave his last work, restating 
his mythical theory, if only that theory had not, as 
every scholar knows, died and been buried before its 
author. [Applause.] 

The supreme question concerning the origin of the 
New-Testament literature is now, whether, in less 
than thirty years intervening between the death of 
the Author of Christianity and A.D. 60, in which 
Paul's Epistles are known to have become authori- 
ties, there is room enough in the age of Livy and 
Tacitus for the growth and inwreathing of mythical 
fictions around an idolized memory lying in the dim 
haze of the past. An unscholarly and discredited 
theory was presented to you yesterday gracefully, 
bat not forcefully. 

Let us see what a vigorous and unpartisan mind 
says on the same topic. " I know men," said Napo- 



TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 35 

leon at St. Helena — the record is authentic ; read it 
in Liddons' Bampton Lectures on the Divinity of Our 
Lord, the best recent book on that theme, — "I 
know men, and I tell you that Jesus of Nazareth was 
not a man." Daniel Webster, on his dying-becl, 
wrote on the marble of his tombstone " The Sermon 
on the Mount cannot be a merely human production." 
Renan was particularly cited to you yesterday ; but 
when I went into the study of Professor Dorner, 
Schleiermacher's successor, at Berlin, and conversed 
with him about the greatest sceptics of Europe, I 
came to the name of Renan, and said, " What are we 
to think of his ' Life of Jesus ' ? " 

" Das ist Nichts," he answered, and added no more. 
" That is nothing." [Applause.] 

No doubt, in the fume and foam and froth of liter- 
ary brilliancy serving a lost, bad cause, there may be 
iridescence, as well as in the enduring opal and pearl ; 
but, while the colors seven flashed from the fragile 
spray are as beautiful as foam and froth, they are 
also just as substantial. [Applause.] 

THE LECTURE. 

Side by side under the lindens in the great ceme- 
tery of Berlin lie Fitche and Hegel ; and I am tran- 
scendentalist enough myself to have walked one 
lonely day, four miles, from the tombs of Neander 
and Schleiermacher, on the hill south of the city, to 
the quiet spot where the great philosophers of tran- 
scendentalism lie at rest till the heavens be no more. 
I treasure among the mementos of travel some 



36 TEANSCENDENTALISM. 

broad myrtle-leaves which I plucked from the sods 
that lie above these giants in philosophy ; and, if I 
to-day cast a little ridicule upon the use some of 
their disciples have made of the great tenets of the 
masters, you will not suppose me to be irreverent 
towards any fountain-head of intuitive, axiomatic, 
self-evident truth. You wish, and I, too, wish, cool 
draughts out of the Castalian spring of axioms. 
You are, and I, too, am, thirsty for certainty ; and I 
find it only in the sure four tests of truth, — intuition, 
instinct, experiment, syllogism, — all agreeing. [Ap- 
plause.] But of the four tests, of course the first is 
chief, head and shoulders above all the rest. 

Even in Germany the successors of the great tran- 
scendentalists have made sport for the ages; and 
no doubt here in New England it was to have been 
expected that there should be some sowing of " tran- 
scendental wild-oats." [Applause.] That phrase is 
the incisive language of a daughter of transcen- 
dentalism honored by this generation, and likely to 
be honored by many more. I am asking you to look 
to-day at the erratic side of a great movement, the 
right wing and centre of which I respect, but the 
left wing of which, or that which broke with Chris- 
tianity, has brought upon itself self-confessed defeat. 

What has been the outcome of breaking with 
Christianity in the name of intuitive truth in Ger- 
many? Take up the latest advices, which it is my 
duty, as an outlook committee for this audience, to 
keep before you, and you will find that Immanuel 
Hermann Fichte, the son of this man at whose grave 



TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 37 

I stood in Berlin, has just passed into the Unseen 
Holy ; and that, as his last legacy, he left to the ages 
a work entitled " Questions and Considerations con- 
cerning the Newest Form of German Speculation." 
When, one day, the great Fichte heard the drums of 
Napoleon beat in the streets of Berlin, he closed a 
lecture by announcing that the next would be given 
when Prussia had become free; and then enlisted 
against the conqueror, and kept his word. The son 
has had a more quiet life than the father ; but he has 
given himself exclusively to philosophy. The second 
Fichte was the founder of the " Journal of Specula- 
tive Philosophy," now conducted by Ulrici and 
Wirth ; and he has lived through much. He knew 
his father's system presumably well. Has it led to 
pantheism or materialism with him, as it has with 
some others? If Emerson has made pantheism a 
logical outcome of Fichte' 's teachings, ivhat has Fichte 's 
son made of them? The son of the great Fichte 
has been a professor at Dusseldorf and Bonn, and, 
since 1842, at Tubingen. He is a specialist in 
German philosophy if ever there was one ; and his 
latest production was a history of his own philosophi- 
cal school. He attempted to show that the line of 
sound philosophy in Germany is represented by three 
great names, — Leibnitz and Kant and Lotze. You 
do not care to have from me an outline of his work ; 
and perhaps, therefore, you will allow me to read 
the summary of it given by your North-American 
Review, for that certainly ought to be free from 
partisanship. Thus Fichte loftily writes to Zeller, 



38 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

tHe biographer of Strauss, and his positions are a 
sign of the times : — 

" Ethical theism is now master of the situation. 
The attempt to lose sight of the personal God in 
nature, f)r to subordinate his transcendence over the 
universe to any power immanent in the universe, and 
especially the tendency to deny the theology of ethics, 
and to insist only upon the reign of force, are utterly 
absurd, and are meeting their just condemnation." 
[Applause.] (North-American Review, January, 1877, 
p. 147.) 

Concord once listened to Germany. Will it con- 
tinue to listen ? Cambridge cannot show at the foot 
of her text-book pages five English names where she 
can show ten German. In the footnotes of learned 
works you will find German authorities a dozen 
times where you can find English six, or American 
three. Let us appeal to no temporary swirl of cur- 
rents, but to a Gulf Stream. Of course, history is 
apt to be misleading, unless we take it in long 
ranges. Read Sir William Hamilton's celebrated 
summary (Note A, Appendix to Reid's works), if 
you wish to see the whole gulf current of belief in 
self-evident truth since Aristotle. But here in Ger- 
many is a vast stretch of modern philosophical dis- 
cussion, beginning with Leibnitz, running on through 
Kant, and so coming down to Lotze ; and it is all on 
the line of intuitive truth, and it never has broken 
with Christianity, nor been drawn into either the 
Charybdis of materialism or the Scylla of pantheism. 
[Applause.] 



TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 39 

The latest and acutest historian of German the- 
ology, Schwartz of Gotha, says that Strauss desig- 
nates not so much a beginning as an end, and that 
the supreme lack in his system is twofold, — the 
absence of historical insight and of religious sensi- 
bility. Now, I will not deny that rationalism in New 
England, with eight generations of Puritan culture 
behind it, has often shown religious sensitiveness. 
Some transcendentalists who have broken with 
Christianity I reverence so far forth as they retain 
here in New England a degree of religious sensibility 
which is often utterly unknown among rationalists 
abroad. Heaven cause my tongue to cleave to the 
roof of my mouth if ever I say aught ironical, or in 
any way derogatory, of that consciousness of God 
which underlay the vigor of Theodore Parker, which 
is the transfiguring thing in Emerson, and which, 
very much further down in the list of those who are 
shy of Christianity, is yet the glory of their thinking, 
and of their reverence for art, and is especially the 
strength of their philanthropic endeavors ! [Ap- 
plause.] We have no France for a neighbor ; wars 
have not stormed over America as they have over 
Europe ; and it cannot yet be said, even of our 
erratics, as undoubtedly it can be of many French 
and German ones, that they have lost the conscious- 
ness of God. 

What is Transcendentalism ? 

You will not suspect me of possessing the mood 
of that acute teacher, who, on the deck of a Missis- 
sippi steamer, was asked this question, and replied, 



40 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

" See the holes made in the bank yonder by the 
swallows. Take away the bank, and leave the aper- 
tures, and this is Transcendentalism." The answer 
to this is the certainty that we are all bank-swallows. 
The right wing and the centre of this social, twitter- 
ing human race live in these apertures, as well as the 
left wing ; and it would be of little avail to ridicule 
the self-evident truths on which our own peace de- 
pends. I affirm simply that Transcendentalism of 
the left wing has not been consistent with Transcen- 
dentalism itself. 

My general proposition is, that rationalistic Tran- 
scendentalism in New England is not Transcendental- 
ism, but, at the last analysis, Individualism. 

Scholars will find that on this occasion, as on 
many others, discussion here is purposely very ele- 
mentary. 

1. The plan of the physical organism is not in the 
food by which the organism is sustained. 

2. The mechanism by which the assimilation of 
food is effected exists before the food is received. 

3. But, until the food is received, that mechanism 
does not come into operation. 

4. The plan of the spiritual organism is not in the 
impressions received through sensation and associa- 
tion. 

5. The fundamental laws of thought exist in the 
plan of the soul anterior to all sensation or associa- 
tion. 

6. But they are brought into operation only by 
experience through sensation and association. 



TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 41 

7. It is absurd to say that the plan of the body is 
produced by its food. 

8. It is equally absurd to say that the plan, oi 
fundamental intuitive beliefs of the soul, are pro- 
duced by sensation and association. 

9. Therefore, as the plan of the body does not 
have its origin in the food of the body, so the plan 
of the mind does not have its origin in the food of 
the mind. 

You receive food, and a certain plan in your physi- 
cal organism distributes it after it is received, assim- 
ilates it, and you are entirely sure that the mechan- 
ism involved in this process exists before the food. 
It may be that every part of my physical system is 
made up of food and drink which I have taken, or 
of air which I have breathed ; and yet there is one 
thing in me that the food did not give me, or the air ; 
and that is the plan of my physical organism. [Ap- 
plause.] Not in the gases, not in the fluids, not in 
the solids, was there the plan of these lenses in the 
eye, or of this harp of three thousand strings in 
the /ear. 

Besides all the materials which go to make up a 
watch, you must have the plan of the watch. If I 
were to place a book on my right here, and then 
take another copy of the book and tear it into shreds, 
and cast these down on the left, it would not be law- 
ful to say that I have on one side the same that I 
have on the other. In one case the volume is 
arranged in an intelligible order : in the other it is 
chaotic. Besides the letters, we must have the co- 



42 TBANSCENDENTALISM. 

ordination of the letters in the finished volume. So 
in man's organism it is perfectly evident that the 
food which we eat, and which does, indeed, build 
every thing in us, is not us ; for the plan of us is 
something existing before that food enters the sys- 
tem, and that plan separates the different elements, 
and distributes them in such a way as to bring out 
the peculiarities of each individual organism. 

Now, whether or not you admit that there is a 
spiritual organism behind the physical, whether or 
not you agree with your Beales and Lotzes and 
Ulricis in asserting that the scientific method re- 
quires that we should suppose that there is in us a 
spiritual organism which weaves the physical, you 
will at least admit, that, so far as the individual ex- 
perience is concerned, we have within us laws, funda- 
mental, organic, and, if not innate, at least connate. 
They came into the world with us ; they are a part 
of the plan on which we are made. When we touch 
the external world with the outer senses, and the 
inner world with the inner senses, no doubt food is 
coming to our souls ; but that plan is the law accord- 
ing to which all our experiences through sensation 
and association are distributed. 

10. The school of sensationalism in philosophy 
maintains that the soul's laws are only an accumula- 
tion of inheritances. 

11. To that school, self-evident truths themselves 
are simply those which result from an unvarying and 
the largest experience ; or those which have been 
deeply engraved on our physical organisms by the 



TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 43 

uniform sensations of our whole line of ancestors 
back to the earliest and simplest form of life. 

12. Human experience cannot embrace all space 
and time. 

13. Sensationalism in philosophy, therefore, which 
holds that all the intuitive or axiomatic truth's arise 
from experience, must deny that we can be sure that 
these truths are true in all space and time. 

14. But we are thus sure ; and sensationalism is 
wrecked on its palpable inability to explain by 
experience this confessed certainty. 

Face to face with this inadequate explanation 
which evolution offers for the self-evident, necessary, 
and universal truths of the soul, let us look at the 
worst. 

It matters to me very little how my eyes came into 
existence, if only they see accurately. You say con- 
science was once only a bit of sensitive matter in a 
speck of jelly. You afnrm, that, by the law of the 
survival of the fittest, in the struggle of many jelly- 
specks with each other for existence, one peculiarly- 
vigorous jelly-speck obtained the advantage of its 
brethren, and so became the progenitor of many vig- 
orous jelly-specks. Then these vigorous jelly-specks 
made new war on each other ; and individuals, ac- 
cording to the law of heredity with variation, having 
now and then fortunate endowments, survived, and 
transmitted these, to become better and better, until 
the jelly-specks produce the -earliest seaweed. By 
and by a mollusk appears under the law of the sur- 
vival of the fittest, and then higher and higher 



44 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

forms, till at last, through infinite chance and mis- 
chance, man is produced. Somewhere and somehow 
the jelly-specks get not only an intellect, not only 
artistic perception, but conscience and will, and this 
far-reaching longing for immortality, this sense that 
there is a Mind superior to ours on which we are 
dependent. Now, for a moment, admit that this the- 
ory of evolution, which Professor Dawson, in an arti- 
cle in the last number of the " International Review," 
on Huxley in New York, says will be regarded by 
the next age as one of the most mysterious of illu- 
sions, is true, the supreme question yet remains, — 
whether my conscience is authority. 

Take something merely physical, like the eyes. 
When I was a jelly-speck of the more infirm sort, 
or at least when I was a fish, I saw something, and 
what I saw I saw. When I was a lichen, although 
I was not a sensitive-plant, I felt something, and 
what I felt I felt. So when, at last, these miracu- 
lous lenses began to appear, as the law of the sur- 
vival of the fittest rough-hewed them age after age, 
I saw better and better ; but what I saw I saw : and 
to-day I feel very sure that the deliverance of the 
eyes is accurate. I am not denying here any of 
the facts as to our gradual acquisition of the knowl- 
edge of distance and of dimension ; that comes from 
the operation of all the senses ; but we feel certain 
that what we see we see. 

Suppose, then, that, in this grand ascent from the 
jelly-speck to the archangel, the process of evolution 
shall at last make our eyes as powerful as the best 



TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 45 

telescopes of the present day. It will yet plainly 
be true, will it not, that what we see we see ? and as 
the eyes are now good within their range, so, when 
they become telescopic, they will be good within 
their range. Just so, even if we hold to the evolu- 
tionary hypothesis in its extremest claims, we must 
hold, that, if conscience was good for any thing when 
it was rudimentary, it is good now in its higher stage 
of development. If by and by it shall become tele- 
scopic, what it sees it will see. [Applause.] I will 
not give up for an instant the authority of connate, 
although you deny all innate truth. You may show 
me that fatalism is the result of your evolutionary 
hypothesis ; you may prove to me that immortality 
cannot be maintained if your philosophy is true; 
you may, indeed, assert, as Hackel does, " that there 
is no God but necessity," if you are an evolutionist 
of the thorough-going type, that is, not only a 
Darwinian, but an Hackelian. But let Hackel's 
consistent atheistic evolutionism, which Germany 
rejects with scorn, be adopted, and it will yet remain 
true that there is a plan in man ; and that, while 
there is a plan in man, there will be a best way to 
live ; and that, while there is a best way to live, it 
will be best to live the best way. [Applause.] 

There is, however, no sign of the progress of the 
Hackelian theory of evolution toward general accept- 
ance. On every side you are told that evolution is 
more and more the philosophy of science. But 
which form of the theory of evolution is meant? 
The Darwinian is a theory, the Hackelian is the 
theory, of evolution. 



46 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

15. Observing our mental operations, we very 
easily convince ourselves that we are sure of the 
truth of some propositions, concerning which neither 
we nor the race have had experience. 

16. If it be true that all these certainties that we 
call self-evident arise simply from experience, it 
must be shown that our certainties do not reach 
beyond our experience. 

It is very sure, is it not, that the sun might rise 
to-morrow morning in the west? Neither we nor 
our ancestors have had any experience of its rising 
there. Space is a necessary idea, but the rising of 
the -sun in the east is not ; and yet our experience 
of the one is as invariable as that of the other. 
That blazing mass of suns we call Orion might have 
its stellar points differently arranged ; and yet I 
never saw Orion in any shape other than that which 
it now possesses. I am perfectly confident that the 
gems on the sword-hilt of Orion might be taken 
away, or never have been in existence ; but I never 
yet saw Orion without seeing there the flashing of 
the jewels on the hilt of his sword. 

John Stuart Mill would say, and so would George 
Henry Lewes, — whose greatest distinction, by the 
way, is, that he is the husband of Marian Evans, the 
authoress of " Daniel Deronda," — that, although my 
own experience never has shown to me Orion in any 
other shape than that which it now possesses, per- 
haps my ability to give it another shape in thought 
may arise from some experience in the race behind 
me. We are told by the school of evolution, that it 



TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 47 

is not our individual experience that explains our 
necessary ideas, but the transmitted experience of 
the race behind us. We have inherited nervous 
changes, from the whole range of the development 
of the species ; and so, somewhere and somehow in 
the past, there must have been an experience which 
give's you the capacity to say that the sun may rise in 
the west, and that Orion might have another shape. 
But is it not tolerably sure that none of my grand- 
fathers or great-grandfathers, back to the jelly-speck, 
ever saw the sun rise in the west ? The human race 
never saw Orion in any other shape. The truth is, 
that experience goes altogether too short a distance 
to account for the wide range of such a certainty, as 
that every effect, not only here, but everywhere, 
must have a cause. 

17. Experience does not teach what must be, but 
only what is ; but we know that every change not 
only has, but must have, a cause. 

I never had any experience in the Sun, or in the 
Seven Stars. I never paced about the Pole with 
Ursa Major, across the breadth of one of whose eye- 
lashes my imagination cannot pass without fainting ; 
I know nothing of the thoughts of Saggitarius, as he 
bends his bow of fire yonder in the southern heavens : 
but this I do know, that everywhere and in all time 
every change must have a cause. You are certain of 
the universality of every necessary truth. "How are 
you to account for that certainty by any known 
experience ? 

18. We cannot explain by experience a certainty 
that goes beyond experience. 



48 TBANSCENDENTALISM. 

John Stuart Mill, perfectly honest and perfectly 
luminous, comes squarely up to this difficulty, and 
says in so many words, " There may be worlds in 
which two and two do not make four, and where a 
change need not have a cause." (Examination of 
Hamilton's Philosophy; see, also, Mill's Logic, 
book iii. chap, xxi.) So clearly does he see this ob- 
jection, that, astounding some of his adherents, he 
made this very celebrated admission, which has done 
more to cripple the philosophy of sensationalism, 
probably, than any other event in its history for the 
last twenty-five years. Even mathematical axioms 
may be false. You and I, gentlemen, feel, and must 
feel, that this conclusion is arbitrary ; that it is not 
true to the constitution of man ; that we have within 
us something which asserts not only the present 
earthly certainty, that every change must have a 
cause, but that forever and forever, in all time to 
come, and backward through all time past, this law 
holds. 

19. Everywhere, all exact science assumes the 
universal applicability of all true axioms in all time 
and in all places. 

Rejecting in the name of exact science, therefore, 
Mill's startling paradox, we must conclude that we 
are not loyal to the indications of our own constitu- 
tion, unless we say that there is in us a possibility of 
reaching certainty beyond experience. Now to do 
that is to reach a transcendental truth. 

20. Transcendental truths are simply those neces- 
sary, self-evident, axiomatic truths which transcend 



TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 49 

experience. Transcendentalism is the science of 
such self-evident, axiomatic, necessary truths. 

Kant gave this name to a part of his philosophy, 
and it is by no means a word of reproach. Of course 
I am treating Transcendentalism, not with an eye on 
New England merely, but with due outlook on this 
form of philosophy throughout the world, especially 
upon Coleridge and Wordsworth, Mansel and Mau- 
rice, and Sir William Hamilton, and Leibnitz and 
Kant and Lotze. I am not taking Transcendental- 
ism in that narrow meaning in which some opponents 
of it may have represented it to themselves. That 
every change, here and everywhere, not only has, but 
must have, a cause, is a transcendental truth : it tran- 
scends experience. So the certainty that here and 
everywhere things which are equal to the same thing 
are equal to each other is a transcendental certainty. 
Our conviction in the moral field that sin can*- be a 
quality only of voluntary action is a transcendental 
fact. This moral axiom we feel is sure in all time 
and in all space. There are moral intuitions as well 
as intellectual. There are sesthetic intuitions, I be- 
lieve ; and they will yet produce a science of the 
beautiful, as those of the intellect and the conscience 
produce sciences of the true and the good. If man 
have no freedom of will, he cannot commit sins in the 
strict sense, for demerit implies free agency ; and we 
feel that this is a moral certainty, and you cannot go 
behind it. 

Coleridge complained much in his time of "that 
compendious philosophy which contrives a theory 



50 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

for spirit by nicknaming matter, and in a few hours 
can qualify its dullest disciples to explain the omne 
scibile by reducing all things to impressions, ideas, and 
sensations " (Biograph. Liter aria, chap. xii.). What 
would he have said to the recent attempt by Tyndall 
to nickname matter, and call it mind, or a substance 
with a spiritual and physical side ? Only the other 
day, Lewes endeavored to nickname sensation, and 
call it both the internal law of the soul and the ex- 
ternal sense. Will you please listen to an amazing 
definition out of the latest, and perhaps the subtlest 
attempt to justify sensationalism in philosophy? 
" The sensational hypothesis is acceptable, if by 
sense we understand sensibility and its laws of opera- 
tion. This obliterates the very distinction insisted 
on by the other school. It includes all psychical 
phenomena under the rubric of sensibility. It en- 
ables pyschological analysis to be consistent and ex- 
haustive." (Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind, 
1874, vol. i. p. 208.) 

This passage affirms, that, if you will say food is the 
body, food will explain the body. If you will take 
the metal which goes to make the watch as not only 
the metal, but the plan of the watch too, then your 
matter and your plan put together will be the watch. 
He wants sensation to mean sensibility and its laws ; 
that is to say, he would have the very fundamental 
principles of our soul included in this term, which, 
thus interpreted, I should say, with Coleridge, is a 
nickname. Such a definition concede/ much by im- 
plication ; but Lewes concedes in so many words, that, 



TKANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 51 

" if by sense is meant simply the five senses, the 
reduction of all knowledge to a sensuous origin is 
absurd." 

Such is the latest voice, my friends, from the oppo- 
nents of the Intuitional school in philosophy ; and it 
is substantially a confession, that, unless a new defini- 
tion be given to sensation, the sensational philosophy 
must be given up. Stuart Mill affirmed that two and 
two might make seven in Orion, and that a change 
possibly might not have a cause in the North Star. 
He was forced to no greater straits than the husband 
of George Eliot is, when he says that the only escape 
from the necessity of adopting the intuitional philoso- 
phy is to assume its definitions as those of the sensa- 
tional school itself. Bloody, unjust exploits, are 
often performed by lawless men on the battle-field of 
philosophy ; but, after all, the ages like to see fair 
play. We must observe the rules of the game. When 
Greek wrestlers stood up together, the audience and 
the judges saw to it that the rules of the game were 
observed. These were defined rigidly. All religious 
science asks of scepticism, in this age or any other, is, 
that it will observe the laws of the scientific method. 
We must adhere to the rules of the game ; and when 
established definitions are nicknamed,"as they now are 
by materialism, suicide is confession. [Applause.] 



nr. 

THEODOEE PAEKEE'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 

THE SIXTY-FIRST LECTURE LN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC- 
TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE JAN. 15. 



" Si l'experience interne immediate pouvait nons tromper, il ne 
saurait y avoir pour moi aucune verite de fait, j'ajoute ni de 
raison." — Leibnitz. 

" Corpus enim per se communis deliquat esse, 
Sensus; quo nisi prima fides fundata valebit, 
Haud erit, occultis de rebus quo referentes, 
Confirmare animi, quicquam ratione queamus." 

Lucretius. 



xn. 



THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELI- 
GION. 

PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. 

It was once my fortune in the city of Edinburgh 
to visit the famous room in which Burke and Hare 
committed fourteen murders by dropping men through 
a trap-door, and afterwards strangling them, that 
they might obtain human skins to sell to physicians 
for medical purposes. Across the street from this 
classical cellar of horrors, there used to be an old 
tan-loft, in the midst of a population one quarter of 
which was on the poor-roll, and another quarter 
measly with the unreportable vices. When Thomas 
Chalmers was a professor in the University of Edin- 
burgh, he deliberately selected this verminous and 
murderous quarter as the spot in which to begin a 
crucial trial of a plan of his for the solution of the 
problem as to the management of the poor in great 
cities. It was his audacious belief, that there is no 
population so degraded in any of our large towns, 
that it will not maintain Christian institutions if 
once these are fairly set on foot. Southward from 

55 



56 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

the gray cliff on which Edinburgh's renowned his- 
toric castle stands, he took the district called the 
West Port, with a population of about two thousand, 
and divided it into twenty sub-districts, and ap- 
pointed over each one a visitor, sometimes a lady, 
and sometimes a gentleman. It was the business of 
these angels of mercy to go once each week into 
every family, without exception, and to leave there, 
not often money, not always food, but an invitation 
to the children to attend the industrial and religious 
schools, and to parents to become members of the 
church of which Chalmers had the supreme courage 
to begin the formation in the old tan-loft, face to 
face with that room in which fourteen murders had 
been committed. This visitation was made thorough. 
Every person aided was taught to pay something, 
however little, for the support of the school and 
church opened for his benefit. A feeling of self- 
respect was thus systematically cultivated. This 
was an essential portion of the Chalmerian plan. 
The enterprise of founding a self-supporting church 
among the poor and vile in the West Port of Edin- 
burg was in five years so successful, that, out of a 
hundred and thirty-two communicants, more than a 
hundred in the church were from the population of 
the West Port. Not a child of suitable age lived in 
the district and was not in school. A savings bank 
had been instituted, a washing-house had been 
opened, an industrial school had been maintained 
day and night in the secular portions of the week. 
Better than all, the entire expense of all these insti- 



THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 57 

tutions, amounting to thirty thousand dollars a year, 
was paid by the West Port ; and that improved 
section of paupers had money enough every year to 
contribute seventy pounds for benevolent purposes 
outside the borders of their own territory. [Ap- 
plause.] 

It was thought this enterprise would fail on Chal- 
mers's death ; but, so far from doing so, his famous 
territorial church is to-day in a flourishing condition, 
and has been extensively copied in Scotland. His 
plan of territorial visitation and self-supporting reli- 
gious enterprises has become one of the best hopes of 
the poor in Scotland's great cities. I worshipped 
once in the West Port church, and found there the 
names of fifty or sixty church-officers of various kinds 
posted up on the doors, and arranged in couples, with 
their specific districts for visitation definitely named 
on the bulletin. A hushed, crowded audience of the 
cleanly and respectable poor listened to a vigorous 
address, and made touching contributions for reli- 
gious purposes. Mr. Tasker, the pastor whom Chal- 
mers had chosen, said to me at his tea-table, " There 
is nae rat in yon kirk. I told the people at the first 
I would na minister to a congregation of paupers. 
Every steady attendant pays more or less, and so 
keeps up self-respect. He helps the poor most who 
helps them to help themselves. Yon kirk is self-sup- 
porting." 

Chalmers did not live to see these larger results ; 
but he saw enough to cause him to anticipate them ; 
and he perfectly understood the vast political impor- 



58 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

tance of the complex problem he had attacked. He 
foresaw that more and more the population of the 
world must mass itself in cities. His experiment he 
did not consider complete without aid from the civil 
arm, which ought to second the efforts of philanthro- 
py by executing all righteous public law. 

Most eloquently Chalmers wrote in his advancing 
years : " I would again implore the aid of the author- 
ities for the removal of all these moral, and the aid of 
the Sanitary Board for the removal of all those physi- 
cal, nuisances and discomforts which are found to exist 
within a territory so full of misery and vice at pres- 
ent, yet so full of promise for the future. Could 1 
gain this help from our men in power, and this co-opera- 
tion from the Board of Health, then with the virtue 
which lies in education, and, above all, the hallowing 
influence of the gospel of Jesus Christ, I should look, 
though in humble dependence on the indispensable grace 
from on high, for such a result as, at least in its first be- 
ginnings, I could interpret into the streaks and dawning s 
of a better day ; when, after the struggles and discomforts 
of thirty years, I might depart in peace, and leave the 
further prosecution of our enterprise with comfort and 
calmness in the hands of another generation." (See Me- 
moirs of Chalmers, by Reverend William Hanna, 
London, 1859, chapter entitled " The West Port," p. 
413.) 

Chalmers's celebrated scheme for throttling the 
troubles of the poor and vicious in great towns em- 
braced these three provisions : — 

Territorial visitation, or systematic going about 
from house to house doing good. 



THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 59 

Self-supporting benevolent and religious institu- 
tions among the needy and degraded. 

The execution of righteous law against the tempt- 
ers and fleecers of the poor. [Applause.] 

Gentlemen, some of us here are young yet; and 
we have heard the departing footsteps of the great 
problem of slavery in our own land. We who have in 
expectation our brief careers are listening to the first 
heavy footfalls of a far more menacing problem, that 
concerning greed and fraud in politics, when the 
gigantic and crescent party-spoils of a land greater 
than Caesar ever ruled are made the reward of merely 
party success. But behind that black angel, with 
his far-spreading Gehenna wings shadowing both our 
ocean shores, some of us who are looking forward, and 
are rash, as you think, can but notice the stealthy ad- 
vance of another fell spirit with whom we must con- 
tend; and his name is, The Metropolitan. He is 
the genius that presides over the neglect of the poor in 
great towns. He is the archfiend, who, as the growth 
of all means of intercommunication, causes the world 
to mass its population more and more in cities, 
breathes upon many fashionable churches the sirocco 
of luxury, and leaves them swinging in hammocks, 
attached, on the one side, to the Cross, and on the other 
to the forefinger of Mammon, and not easy even then, 
unless they are eloquently fanned [applause], and 
sprinkled, as the Eastern host sprinkles his guest, with 
lavender ease. [Applause.] Meanwhile, the fiend 
Metropolitan Evil advances with a footfall that already 
sometimes rocks the continent, and yet it appears 



60 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

to be unheard. Now and then the cloven, ominous 
hoof breaks through the thin crust, and there starts 
up a blue flame, as at Paris in communism ; but the 
light is unheeded. Twenty centuries will yet be 
obliged to look at it. One-fifth of the population of 
the United States is now in cities, and we had but one 
twenty-fifth in cities at the opening of the century. 
The disproportionate growth of great towns is a 
phenomenon of all civilized lands, and not simply of 
the United States. London increases faster than 
England, Berlin than Germany, as well as New-York 
City than New-York State, and Chicago than Illi- 
nois. 

This last week in Boston, the American Social 
Science Association discussed work schools in cities, 
— a topic not likely to look empty to honest eyes. 
Much after Thomas Chalmers's plan, there was found- 
ed at the North End, yesterday, a biblical and evan- 
gelical, but wholly undenominational, church for the 
poor. It is a good sign. [Applause.] 

Boston is now a crescent, stretching around the tip 
of the tongue of Massachusetts Bay, from Chelsea 
Beach to the Milton Hills. When you and I are here 
no longer, this growing young moon will embrace 
Mount Auburn, and line with its increasing light both 
shores of our azure sea for miles toward the sunrise. 
It is, however, unsafe to act upon the supposition, 
which some seem to harbor, that all the old peninsula 
here will be needed as a stately commercial exchange, 
and that the very poor can be crowded out of it, into 
homes beyond a ferry, or reached only by railway. 



THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 61 

The poorest of the poor must live very near their 
work. We want model lodging-houses for them, like 
the London Waterlow buildings, which pay six per 
cent on their cost. For a more fortunate class we 
must have cheap houses outside municipal limits. 
But, more than all, we want self-supporting churches 
among the destitute and degraded. 

Boston is more favorably situated than any other 
American city to show how democracy and Chris- 
tianity can govern a great town well. First at the 
throat of Slavery, will Boston be the first American 
city to throttle Metropolitan Evil ? 

Chalmers used to affirm, that cities can be managed 
morally as well as the country-side, if their religious 
privileges are made as great in proportion to their 
population. 

But, gentlemen, while we embrace every opportu- 
nity to call out the efforts of the church in personal 
visitation of the poor, and in the founding of self- 
supporting religious institutions, let us not forget 
the responsibility of the civil arm for the shutting 
up of the dens of temptation. [Applause.] If you 
will visit your more desolate quarters in this city, — 
and the most infamously vicious are not at the North 
End,- — you will find reason to go home with something 
more substantial as your programme of future efforts 
than weak regrets, expressed at your fireside over 
aesthetic tea and your newspaper, about the lack of 
the execution of good laws here. [Applause.] Sev- 
enty-five millions of dollars in this city are engaged in 
the liquor-traffic ; and, if I could shut up the multi- 



62 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

tuclinous doors to temptation, I might shut up the 
alms-houses. This is so trite a truth, that you blame 
me for presenting it; but your Governor Andrew 
used to say, that this truth is trite only because it is 
so superabundantly true and important as to have 
been repeated over and over. 

You loathe the unjust judges of history; you 
place in pillories of infamy men whose duty it has 
been to execute law, and have not done it. Are you 
safe from such pillories? When we, as American 
freemen, give in our account before that bar where 
there is no shuffling, we shall do so as a population to 
whom the sword of justice was given largely in vain. 
We the people, and especially that professional class 
represented here, are intrusted with power, most of 
which is not a terror to evil-doers, nor a praise to them 
who do well. Under the murky threats of the years 
ahead of us, it is the duty of the parlor, the pulpit, 
the press, politics, and the police — the five great 
powers of these modern ages — to join arms and go 
forward in one phalanx for the execution of all those 
just public enactments which shut places of tempta- 
tion, and leave a man a good chance to be born right 
the second time by being born right the first time. 
[Applause.] 

THE LECTURE. 

Professor Tholuck, in his garden at Halle-on-the- 
Saale, once said to me, " The Tubingen school, as 
you know, is no longer in existence at Tubingen it- 
self: as a sect in biblical criticism, it has perished: 



THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 63 

its history has been written in more than one lan- 
guage. Only a few years ago, however, we had six 
broad-backed Englishmen take their seats on the 
university benches at Tubingen, and ask to be taught 
Bauer's theology. But Professors Beck and Landerer 
and Palmer, who oppose that scheme of thought, now 
outgrown among our best scholars, told the sturdy 
sons of Britain, that they must seek elsewhere for 
instruction of that sort ; whereupon they turned their 
faces homeward, sadder, but wiser." 

Theodore Parker was a scholar of the Tubingen 
school. His characteristic positions concerning the 
Bible are those which have seen battle and defeat of 
late in Germany. They are perfectly familiar to all 
who have studied that great range of criticism called 
the Tubingen exegetical biblical criticism. This had 
great influence about the time Parker was forming 
his opinions; and he began his public career by 
launching himself upon what time has proved to be 
only a re-actionary eddy, and not the gulf-current, 
of scholarship. (See article on the " Decline of Ra- 
tionalism in the German Universities," Bib. Sacra, 
October, 1875.) His first work was a translation of 
De Wette. In his formative years of study the now 
outgrown Tubingen critics were his chief reading. 

In philosophy, as distinguished from biblical re- 
search, we all see that Theodore Parker has founded 
no new school. His distinctive positions have no 
large following, even among our erratics. Mr. Frotli- 
ingham of New- York City, who is one of his biogra- 
phers, and perhaps more nearly than any other man 



64 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

his successor, said in 1864, in the North American 
Review, that he anticipates for Theodore Parker as a 
metaphysician no immortality. 

Let me quiet your apprehensions, gentlemen, by 
affirming at the outset my reverence for Theodore 
Parker's antislavery principles. [Applause.] Theo- 
dore Parker's memory stands in the past as a statue. 
The rains, and biting sleet, and winds beat upon it. 
A part of the statue is of clay : a part is of bronze. 
The clay is his theological speculation: the bronze 
is his antislavery action. The clay will be washed 
away ; already it crumbles. The bronze will endure ; 
and, if men are of my mind, it will form a figure to 
be venerated. [Applause.] 

What are the most essential positions of Theodore 
Parker's absolute religion ? 

1. That man has an instinctive intuition of the 
fact of the Divine existence. 

2. That he has an instinctive intuition of the exist- 
ence and authority of the moral law. 

3. That he has an instinctive intuition of his own 
immortality. 

4. That an infinitely-perfect God is omnipresent or 
immanent in the world of matter and in that of spirit. 

5. That this idea of the Divine Perfection and Im- 
manence is unknown to both the Old Testament and 
the New, and to every popular theology. 

6. That the accounts of miracles in the Bible are 
all untrustworthy. 

7. That, when we are free from the love of sin, we 
are also free from the guilt of it. 



THEODORE PARKETt's ABSOLUTE EELIGION". 65 

8. That sin is the tripping of a child who is learn- 
ing to walk, or a necessary, and, for the most part, 
inculpable stage in human progress. 

A very ugly and dangerous set of propositions are 
these last four; a rather inspiring set are the first 
four: but all eight were Theodore Parker's. (See 
Weiss's Life of Parker, vol. ii. pp. 455, 470, 472.) 
Some of his hearers fed themselves on the former, 
some on the latter ; and hence the opposite effects he 
seemed to produce in different cases. It was on the 
first four that he not doubtfully supposed himself to 
have been successful in founding what he called an 
absolute, or natural religion. 

No other document written by Theodore Parker is 
so important, as an exposition of his views, as that 
touching, but in places almost coarsely irreverent, 
letter sent from the West Indies to the Twenty 
eighth Congregational Society, after he had fled 
away from America to die. Nothing else in that 
letter, which he called " Parker's Apology for Him- 
self," is as important as this central passage : — 

" I found certain great primal intuitions of human nature, 
which depend on no logical process of demonstration, but are 
rather facts of consciousness given by the instinctive action of 
human nature itself. I will mention only the three most im- 
portant which pertain to religion : — 

" 1. The instinctive intuition of the divine, — the conscious- 
ness that there is a God. 

" 2. The instinctive intuition of the just and right, — a con- 
sciousness that there is a moral law independent of our will, 
which we ought to keep. 

" 3. The instinctive intuition of the immortal, — a conscious- 



66 TKANSCENDENTALISM. 

ness that the essential element of man, the principle of individ- 
uality, never dies. 

" Here, then, was the foundation of religion, laid in human 
nature itself, which neither the atheist nor the more pernicious 
bigot, with their sophisms of denial or affirmation, could move, 
or even shake. I had gone through the great spiritual trial of 
my life, telling no one of its hopes or fears ; and I thought it a 
triumph that I had psychologically established these three things 
to my own satisfaction, and devised a scheme, which, to the 
scholar's mind, I thought could legitimate what was sponta- 
neously given to all by the great primal instincts of mankind. 
. . . From the primitive facts of consciousness given by the 
power of instinctive intuition, I endeavored to deduce the true 
notion of God, of justice, and futurity. Here I could draw 
from human nature, and not be hindered by the limitations of 
human history; but I know now, better than it was possible 
then, how difficult is this work, and how often the inquirer mis- 
takes his own subjective imagination for a fact of the universe. 
It is for others to decide whether I have sometimes mistaken a little 
grain of brilliant dust in my telescope for a fixed star in heaven. 
[Applause.] (Weiss: Life of Parker, vol. ii. p. 455.) 



Julius Miiller, professor in the University of Halle, 
is commonly" regarded now as the greatest theologian 
in the world. His chief book is a discussion of sin. 
From first to last, his scheme of natural religion is 
built with scientific exactness on self-evident, axiom- 
atic, intuitive truth. The very rock on which Parker 
planted his foot is a corner-stone of the acutest 
evangelical theology of the globe to-day. Read 
Julius Miiller's discussions (Doctrine of Sin, trans, in 
T. & T. Clark's Library, Edinburgh), and you will 
find him more reverent than Theodore Parker toward 
intuitive, axiomatic, self-evident propositions of all 



THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 67 

kinds. He, however, has cleared the whole surface 
of the rock of which Parker, in his haste, saw but a 
part. Instead of building on that broader founda- 
tion a slight structure, he has begun the erection of 
a palace. He has been obliged to stretch its founda- 
tions out to correspond in every part with the once 
unsuspected extent of this whole support of natural 
adamant. Parker strangely overlooked the fact that 
we have an intuitive knowledge of sin as a fact in 
our personal experience. That knowledge must 
shape our philosophy. Building upon it, Julius Mul- 
ler did not ask whether the rising walls he con- 
structed would or would not meet, point for point, 
the walls of the celestial city, which, Revelation 
teaches, lay in the air above him. He did not look 
upward at all, but downward only, upon this revela- 
tion in the constitutional intuitions and instincts. 
He explored conscience. He brought to the light 
the surface of the whole rock of intuitive moral 
truth, and not merely that of a part of it. He built 
around its edges after the plan shown in the adamant 
itself. It turns out, that to-day Germany calls that 
man her chief theologian, because it has found that 
these walls, rising from the adamant of axiomatic 
truth, wholly without regard to the foundations of 
the floating celestial city above, are conterminous* 
and correspondent with those upper walls in every 
part, and that the two palaces are one. [Applause.] 
It is a solemn provision of the courts of law, that 
a man under oath must tell the whole truth, and 
nothing but the truth. In the use of intuitions and 



68 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

instincts, experiment and syllogism, the thing I am 
chiefly anxious about, is, that we clear the whole 
platform before we begin to build. We must take 
the testimony of all the intuitions ; we must be will- 
ing to look into the deliverance of all the instincts ; 
we must neglect no part of man's experiments, con- 
tinued, age after age, in his philanthropic and reli- 
gious life ; we must revere the syllogism everywhere. 
James Freeman Clarke has repeatedly pointed out, 
that an inadequate use of our intuitive knowledge of 
the fact of sin in personal experience is a most 
searching and perhaps fatal flaw in Parker's scheme 
of thought. Give our intuitive knowledge of the 
fact of sin its proper place, and, if you are true to 
the scientific method, the fact that you are sick will 
make you ask for a physician. I am not asserting 
the sufficiency, but only the efficiency, of a wholly 
scientific, natural religion. Every day it becomes 
clearer to philosophical scholarship, that the whole 
deliverance of the Works is synonymous, in every 
vocal and in every whispered syllable, with the whole 
deliverance of the Word. Certain it is, that the 
whole list of moral intuitions, of which Theodore 
Parker made use of but a part, is the basis of the 
acutest evangelical natural theology to-day. When 
I compare the structure that Theodore Parker 
erected here in Boston on a fragment of this adamant 
of axiomatic truth, it seems to me a careless cabin, 
as contrasted with Julius Miiller's palatial work. 
What your New-York palace, appointed in every 
part well, is to that wretched squatter's tenement, 



THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 69 

standing, it may be, face to face with it in the upper 
part of Manhattan Island yonder, such is the com- 
plete intuitional religious philosophy, compared with 
Theodore Parker's absolute religion. [Applause.] 

What are the more important errors in Theodore 
Parker's system of thought ? 

1. It is possible to imagine that the soul is not 
immortal. 

Every materialist here will of course grant me this 
proposition. I am willing to admit that I think it 
entirely possible to imagine the non-existence of the 
soul as a personality after death. The idea of the 
soul's immortality is, therefore, not a necessary idea. 
Of course spiritual substance, like material substance, 
we suppose to be indestructible ; but, as a personal- 
ity, the soul may at least be imagined to cease to 
exist. I cannot, however, so much as imagine that 
space should not exist, or that time should not, or 
that every change should not have a cause. There 
is a perfect incapacity in my mind to conceive of the 
annihilation of space or time : therefore it is per- 
fectly clear that the idea of the soul's immortality is 
not a necessary idea in the same sense in which my 
ideas of space and time are necessary ideas. 

Nor is this idea of immortality a universal idea, as 
that of space or time is. Some sane men appear to 
be without any confidence in immortality as a fact ; 
but there never was a sound mind that did not act 
upon the practical supposition that every change 
must have a cause, and that a thing cannot be and 
not be at the same time in the same sense. Your 



70 TEANSCENDENTALISM. 

urchin on Boston Common who holds a ball in his 
hand behind him, and who hears the assertion from 
some other urchin, that the ball is in another place, 
knows better. He has the ball in his hand; and he 
is perfectly confident that the same thing cannot be 
and not be at the same time and in the same sense. 
You state that proposition to him, and he will stare 
at you with wide eyes. He knows nothing of the 
metaphysical statement: nevertheless, that propo- 
sition is in his possession implicitly, though not 
explicitly. He acts upon it with perfect intelligence. 
He knows that the ball is in his hand, and that 
therefore that ball is not anywhere else. This is 
a self-evident, axiomatic, necessary belief, or an intui- 
tion in the scientific sense of the word. Not in 
that sense, can we call the fact of immortality an 
intuitive truth. 

We have an instinctive anticipation of existence 
after death. We can prove that. There is no real 
intuition of existence after death. 

The proposition that the soul is immortal is there- 
fore not marked by the three traits of intuitive truth, 
— self-evidence, necessity, and universality. 

Only a slovenly scholarship could assert that this 
proposition is marked by these traits. Theodore 
Parker asserted, however, that the fact of immortality 
is an intuitive truth. This unsupported assertion 
was a corner-stone of his absolute religion. 

You will, therefore, allow me to say, that, — 

2. Theodore Parker did not carefully distinguish 
from each other intuition and instinct. 



THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 71 

To blunder on that point is so common, that I shall 
be unable to convince you of the importance of error 
there, unless you take pains in your libraries to apply 
these tests of self-evidence, necessity, and universality 
to a certain class of truths, and see how the tests 
distinguish that class from every other set of proposi- 
tions that you can imagine. Only those truths which 
show the traits of self-evidence, necessity, and univer- 
sality, are intuitive. Loose popular speech may use 
the word intuition carelessly; but when a great 
reader like Theodore Parker confounds instinct and 
intuition, and speaks now about our having an intui- 
tion, and now of our possessing an instinctive intui- 
tion of the immortality of the soul, we must say that 
he is careless ; for it is two thousand years now that 
self-evidence, necessity, and universality have been 
used as the tests of intuitive truth. Between an in- 
stinct and an intuition there is as palpable a distinction 
as between the right hand and the left ; and to con- 
fuse the two, as Theodore Parker's deliberate speech 
does, is unscholarly to the degree of being slovenly. 
I put once before the chief authority of Harvard Uni- 
versity in metaphysics the question, whether meta- 
physical scholars have commonly classed immortality 
among the intuitive truths. He smiled, and said, 
" Who taught you that they have ? " — " Why, I have 
read," said I, "that there was once in Boston a reli- 
gion built up on the idea that immortality is an intu- 
ition." And the smile became even broader, although 
the man was very liberal in his theology. " Theodore 
Parker," said he, " was not a consecutive, philosoph- 



72 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

ical thinker. No metaphysician of repute has ever 
classed immortality among the intuitive truths, al- 
though it has again and again been classed as a deliv- 
erance of our instincts." 

3. It is not safe to assert, as Parker does, that the 
Divine Existence is a strictly intuitive truth. 

Pace amantis ! Peace to all lovers of the doctrine 
that belief in the Divine Existence is intuitive ! I 
wish to treat reverently that school of philosophy 
which asserts that we have an intuition, strictly so- 
called, of the fact that God exists. To me the Di- 
vine Existence is evident; but it is not, strictly 
speaking, self-evident. It is evident by only one 
step of reasoning, and is the highest of derivative, 
but is not really a primitive, first truth, or axiomatic 
fact. It is as sure as any axiom ; but it is not an 
axiom that God is. I can, I think, imagine that 
God might not exist. I cannot imagine that space 
does not, or that time does not. I know that Sir 
Isaac Newton said that space and time are attri- 
butes, and that every attribute must inhere in some 
substance, and that if space and time are necessary 
existences, and are really objective to the mind, and 
not merely a green color thrown upon the universe 
by the mental spectacles which we now wear, then 
God must be, for space and time must be. Pace 
amantis, once more ! I know how many scholars 
agree in the opinion that time and space are merely 
necessary ideas, and not objectively real. They are 
in the color of the glasses through which we look. 
The truth is, that recent philosophy more and more 



THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 73 

approaches the conclusion of Sir Isaac Newton, that 
space and time are objectively real. Dr. McCosh of 
Princeton, George Henry Lewes, materialistic though 
he is, and a score of other recent representatives of 
rival philosophical schools, regard space and time as 
mysterious somewhats, which very possibly have a 
real existence outside our spectacles. They are not 
simply necessary ideas, fixed colors in our spectacles, 
but something outside of us. 

Now it is true, that, if space and time be objec- 
tively real, they imply the existence of something 
that is just as necessary in its existence, and just as 
eternal, as they. If they are qualities of any thing, 
instead of mere colors in the lenses through which 
we look, there must be a substance that is necessary 
in its existence, eternal, and absolutely independent ; 
and that can be only an infinitely perfect being. 
You cannot imagine the non-existence of space or 
time ; you cannot think that they ever were not, or 
that they ever will cease to be ; and so, if they are 
attributes, they are the attributes of a Being that 
was, and is, and is to come. 

Many are now turning to that philosophy which 
the later and the older investigation supports, — 
namely, that space and time are objectively real, and 
that this fact contains incontrovertible proof of the 
Divine Self-Existence. But you derive that argu- 
ment from the existence of space and time ; you do 
not look directly upon the Divine Existence even 
then. There is a single step of reasoning ; and so 
the truth, although evident, is not self-evident. 



74 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

I know how many are puzzled to prove the Divine 
Self-Existence. Paley's argument from the watch, 
we are told by some who misunderstand it, proves 
too much. A design proves a designer? Yes. But 
must not God himself, then, have had a designer, and 
his designer a designer, and his designer a designer, 
and so on forever ? This inquiry is familiar to reli- 
gious science under the name of the question as to the 
Infinite Series. The reply to all that tantalizing ob- 
jection is, that intuitive truth demonstrates the exist- 
ence of dependent being, and that there cannot be 
a dependent without an independent being. There 
cannot be a here without there being a there, can 
there ? There cannot be a before without there being 
an after, can there ? There cannot be an upper with- 
out there being an under, can there ? If, therefore, 
I can prove there is a here, I can prove there is a 
there ; if I can prove there is a before, I can prove 
there is an after ; if I can prove there is an upper, I 
can prove there is an under. Just so, by logical 
necessity, there "cannot be a dependent being without 
an independent ; and I am a dependent being, and 
therefore there is an Independent or Self-Existent 
Being. [Applause.] 

Thus I must be cautious or modest enough not to 
assert that we have a direct intuition of the Divine 
Existence. This truth is instinctive, not intuitive. 
It seems to lie capsulate in all our highest instincts. 
Our sense of dependence and obligation, great facts, 
if barely scratched with the point of a scalpel of 
analysis, reveal Almighty God, and make the soul's 



THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 75 

cheeks pale. I cannot affirm, however, that the 
Divine Existence is self-evident, although it is evi- 
dent as the noon. 

Theodore Parker's assertion that the Divine Exist- 
ence is known to us by intuition implies that this 
truth has the three traits of self-evidence, necessity, 
and universality. 

Only a slovenly scholarship can assert that the 
truth possesses these traits. 

On a score of other points, it might be shown that 
Parker was misled, by not making a sharp distinction 
between instinct and intuition. 

4. He did not carefully distinguish inspiration 
from illumination. 

Once more : peace to the lovers of the doctrine 
that modern men of genius are inspired more or less 
— especially less ! 

There is a book composed of sixty-six pamphlets, 
written in different ages, some of them barbarous; 
and I affirm that there are in the volume no adulter- 
ate moral elements. It is a winnowed book. Its 
winnowedness is a fact made tangible by ages of the 
world's experience. Of course I need not say to 
this distinguished audience, what Galileo said to his 
persecutors, that the Bible is given to teach how to 
go to heaven, and not how the heavens go. Do not 
suppose that inspiration guarantees infallibility in 
merely botanical truth. A small philosopher said to 
me once, " The Bible affirms that the mustard-seed 
is the smallest of all seeds. Now, there are seeds 
so small, that they cannot be seen with the naked 



76 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

eye. Where, therefore, is your doctrine of inspira- 
tion ? " I thought that man's mind was the smallest 
of all mustard-seeds. Inspiration is rightly denned 
in religious science as the gift of infallibility in 
teaching moral and religious truth. The Scriptures 
are given by inspiration in this sense, and therefore 
are profitable for what ? For botany ? That is not 
the record. They are profitable for reproof, correc- 
tion, and instruction in righteousness. They are a 
rule of religious, and not of botanical, faith and 
practice. My mutsard-seed philosopher, like many 
another objector to the doctrine of the inspiration 
of the Scripture, appeared to be in ignorance of the 
definition of inspiration. 

Perfect moral and religious winnowedness exists in 
the Bible, and in no other book in the world. Is there 
any other book the ages could absorb into their 
veins as they have the Bible, and feel nothing but 
health as the result? 

Mr. Emerson told a convention of rationalists once, 
in this city, that the morality of the New Testament 
is scientific and perfect. But the morality of the 
New Testament is that of the Old. Yes, you say; 
but what of the imprecatory Psalms ? A renowned 
professor, who, as Germany thinks, has done more for 
New-England theology than any man since Jonathan 
Edwards, was once walking in this city with a clergy- 
man of a radical faith, who objected to the doctrine 
that the Bible is inspired, and did so on the ground 
of the imprecatory Psalms. The replies of the usual 
kind were made; and it was presumed that David 



THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 77 

expressed the Divine purpose in praying that his 
enemies might be destroyed, and that he gave utter- 
ance only to the natural righteous indignation of 
conscience against unspeakable iniquity. But the 
doubter would not be satisfied. The two came at 
last to a newspaper bulletin, on which the words 
were written, — the time was at the opening of our 
civil war, — "Baltimore to be shelled at twelve 
o'clock." " I am glad of it," said the radical preach- 
er; "I am glad of it." — "And so am I," said his 
companion ; " but I hardly dare say so, for fear you 
will say I am uttering an imprecatory psalm." [Ap- 
plause.] 

One proof of the inspiration of the Bible is its 
perfect moral winnowedness ; and there are a thou- 
sand other proofs. Inspiration must at least guaran- 
tee winnowedness ; and I find no modern inspiration 
that guarantees even as little as that. I am not 
giving the proof of inspiration, but only illustrating 
the distinction between inspiration and illumination. 

Why, our literati will probably bow down before 
Shakspeare as an inspired man, if that phrase is to 
be taken in the loose, misleading sense in which 
Parker used it. How often otherwise brilliant litera- 
ture tells us that inspiration is of the same kind in 
all writers, sacred and profane, differing only in 
degree ! Very well : if any modern man has been 
inspired, perhaps Shakspeare was. But is there 
moral winnowedness in his writings? Shakspeare's 
father was a high bailiff of Stratford-on-Avon. John 
Shakspeare, alderman, high bailiff, and justice of the 



78 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

peace, the worshipful, — these were Shakspeare's 
father's titles ; and it was his business to execute the 
laws. But in 1552 he was fined for the unsavory 
offence of allowing a heap of refuse to accumulate in 
front of his own door. The next year he repeated 
this violation of law (White's Shakspeare, vol. i. p. 
15). The son afterwards exhibited by fits much of 
the father's mind. [Applause.] I never read certain 
passages in Shakspeare without thinking of that 
experience of the high bailiff on Henley Street, in 
Stratford. Nevertheless, although Shakspeare's mir- 
ror is so wide that it takes into its lower ranges the 
gutter and the feather-heads, it takes in, also, in its 
upper ranges, eternity itself. [Applause.] This great 
soul held the mirror up, not merely to time, but, in 
some sense, to the Unseen Holy. I reverence him 
fathomlessly, but not as a winnowed writer. u He 
never blotted a line," said Ben Jonson. " Would he 
had blotted a thousand ! " 

There is no winnowed writer outside of the Bible. 
You cannot put together out of the world a dozen, 
or six, to say nothing of sixty-six pamphlets, that 
shall contain, as the sixty-six in the Bible do, an 
harmonious system of religious truth, and no morally 
adulterate element. Where are there six volumes 
that could be stitched together, even from among 
those that Christianity has inspired, of which we can 
say they possess this lowest, and by no means ex- 
haustive trait of true inspiration, — perfect moral 
and religious winnowedness ? The difference between 
illumination and inspiration is as vast as that between 



THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 79 

the east and west. Long enough we have heard, 
here in Boston, that all men are inspired more or 
less ; and long enough have we learned that the con- 
fusion of inspiration and illumination with each 
other may work endless mischief, even when a man 
as honest as Theodore Parker endeavors to build up, 
after confusing them, a system of faith. 

It is not unimportant to notice that our faith in 
inspiration, rightly defined, would not be touched 
at all, even if we were to prove a geological error 
in every verse of the first chapter of Genesis. I 
do not believe there is any geological error there. 
With Dana, with Guyot, with Pierce, with Dawson, 
we can hold that the record of the progress of events 
in the creation of the world is correct. If this is 
correct, it must have been inspired ; for, unless it 
was taught to him from above, no man could have 
known the complex order accurately of events that 
occurred before man was. Dana says, in his last 
chapter of his Geology, " This document in the first 
chapter of Cfenesis, if true, is of divine origin. It is 
profoundly philosophical in the scheme of creation 
it presents. It is both true and divine. It is a 
declaration of authorship, both of creation and the 
Bible" (Geology, pp. 767, 770). Read Thomas 
Hill's subtly powerful articles just issued in a book 
on u The Natural Sources of Theology," and you 
will find this ex-president of Harvard University, 
together with Professor Pierce, holding similar views. 
The biblical record states that light was created 
before the sun, — a most searching proof of inspira- 



80 TKANSCENDENTALISM. 

tion ; for we know now that the first shiver of the 
molecular atoms must have produced light ; and the 
sun, according to the nebular hypothesis, must have 
come into existence long afterwards. But what if 
merely geological or botanical error, touching no 
religious truth, were found in the Bible, we should 
yet hold, that, in the first leaves of the Scriptures, 
we have most unspeakably important religious truth. 
They teach the spiritual origin of creation ; they 
teach that man had a personal Creator ; they show, 
that in the beginning, God, an individual Will, 
brought into existence the heavens and the earth. 
I do not admit that scientific error has been proved 
against the Bible anywhere; but if an error in 
merely physical science, touching no religious truth, 
were proved, inspiration would yet stand unharmed. 
Parker's trouble with the Bible arose largely from 
his carelessness in definitions. Confusing intuition 
and instinct, and inspiration and illumination, he 
made almost as great mistakes as when he confused 
the supernatural with the unnatural. 

Call up, gentlemen, that day when Theodore Par- 
ker left New York, and put in his Bible an Italian 
violet opposite the words, " I will be with thee in 
the great waters." I stood alone at Florence, at the 
side of the grave of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and 
looked on the grave of Theodore Parker. The 
sturdy Apennines gazed on the soft flow of the Arno ; 
melodious murmurs whispered through the fatness of 
the olive-branches ; there fell in deluges out of the 
unspeakable azure in the Italian sky the light of the 



THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 81 

sun and of the sun behind the sun. I remembered 
the culture of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and her 
faith. I could not forget how wide was her outlook 
upon the inner world as well as upon the outer, 
how subtle beyond comment her instincts and intu- 
itions; and in my solitude I asked mj^self, which 
faith — hers, or his — was likely to be of most service 
to the world in the swirling tides of history, and 
which the best support to individual souls in the 
great waters on which we pass hence. I remembered 
tenderly the good there was in this man and in this 
woman ; but I asked which had the better faith for 
service in great waters. Both loved the poor ; there 
was in each one of these souls at birth a spark out 
of the empyrean ; and, under that Italian azure, I 
asked which faith had been the most efficient in 
fanning that spark to flame. It seemed to me, at 
the side of those graves in Italy, that Elizabeth Bar- 
rett Browning, had she stood there alive, would have 
had eyes before which those of Theodore Parker 
would have fallen, to rise again only when possessed 
of her deeper vision. Strike out of existence that 
teaching which has come to us through the God 
in Christ, whom Elizabeth Barrett Browning wor- 
shipped, but whom Theodore Parker held to be a 
myth, or merely a man ; strike out of existence that 
healing which is offered to the race in an ineffable 
Atonement, which in the solitudes of conscience may 
be scientifically known to be the desire of all nations ; 
strike out of existence these truths, — and then, if the 
moral law which Parker glorified none too much 



82 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

continues its demands, you will have stricken out 
the solution of life's greatest enigma. Great is the 
law, said Theodore Parker. Yes, I know it is great, 
said Elizabeth Barrett Browning ; I know that the law 
is spiritual ; it is glorious ; all you say of it, I affirm 
with deeper emphasis : but I am carnal ; I am not at 
peace before that law : who shall deliver me f Faith- 
fulness to all the intuitions would have brought that 
man, as it brought this woman, to this supreme ques- 
tion, the resounding shore of our mightiest inner sea ; 
and it would have given assured safety there in the 
last day for your reformer who disbelieved, as for 
your poetess who believed; and the safety would 
have been in this only possible answer : " I will be 
with thee in the great waters." [Applause.] 



IV. 



CARICATURED DEFINITIONS IN RELIGIOUS 

SCIENCE. 

THE SIXTY-SECOND LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC- 
TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE JAN. 22. 



"Lsr natural philosophy there was no less sophistry, no less 
dispute and uncertainty, than in other sciences, until, about a 
century and a half ago, this science began to be built upon the 
foundation of clear definitions and self-evident axioms. Since that 
time, the science, as if watered with the dew of heaven, hath grown 
apace: disputes have ceased, truth hath prevailed, and the science 
hath received greater increase in two centuries than in two thousand 
years before." — Held: Collected Writings, vol. i. p. 219. 

"It is well said by the old logicians, Omnis intuit iva notitia est 
definitio ; that is, a view of the thing itself is its best definition. 
This is true both of the objects of sense and of the objects of self- 
consciousness." — Sir William Hamilton. 



IV. 



CARICATURED DEFINITIONS IN RELI- 
GIOUS SCIENCE. 

PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. 

If Belgium or Holland had two kings, we should 
loftily look down on those European states as illus- 
trations of the effeteness of monarchical government. 
But South Carolina is twice as large as Belgium, and 
Louisiana three times as large as Holland, and each 
of these States has two legislatures elected in our 
centennial year. Nevertheless, face to face with our 
wide areas of Mexicanized politics, we loftily foster 
our pride, or lightly excuse ourselves from political 
duties, as if after us were to come the deluge. 
Something of a deluge, one would think, has already 
swept over us in a civil war; but it fell out of a 
cloud that was once thought to be not larger than a 
man's hand. A murky threat in it, indeed ; but when 
that cloud had overspread all our national horizon, 
when its leagued massive thunders filled all our 
azure, when its forked zig-zag threats blazed above 
all business and bosoms, the best of us were yet 
doubtful whether there was to be much of a shower. 

85 



8b TEANSCENDENTALISM. 

The most popular orator of this nation I heard 
address a collegiate audience three days before 
Sumter fell; and, walking to the edge of the plat- 
form, he asked, " What is going to happen ? " and 
then whispered, with his hand above his lips, " Just 
nothing at all." 

Perhaps it is worth while to look a little at the 
murky threat of Mexicanization in portions of our 
politics ; for who knows whether we are to be saved 
from all our difficulties by an ex post facto electoral 
law ? Will troubles never come again ? What if a 
presidential election as close as the last had taken 
place in the midst of our civil war ? Will indecisive 
contests for political primacy in a territory greater 
than Cassar governed never again tempt the gigantic 
contestants to fraud ? Will colossal partisan spoils 
and political corruption soon cease to stand in the 
relation of cause and effect? Our fathers studied 
British precedents to avoid British dangers ; but is it 
not high time to begin to study American precedents 
in order to avoid American dangers ? Are we now 
seeking to throttle the real causes of our civil dis- 
tresses, or dealing only with a few of their effects ? 
How long is intimidation to last on the Gulf? How 
long will the ignorant ballot be a threatening politi- 
cal fact in the slums of Northern cities ? 

Massachusetts, you say, is very highly cultured, 
and is outgrowing the evils that attend on the youth 
of republics. Are you sure, that, when the popula- 
tion of Massachusetts is as dense as that of England, 
your Massachusetts laws will make every thing 



CARICATURED DEFINITIONS. 87 

smooth here ? Has this Commonwealth a right to be 
proud of its exemption from illiteracy? There are 
here a million, six hundred thousand people, and a 
hundred thousand of them are illiterates. Of a hun- 
dred thousand citizens in Massachusetts above ten 
years of age, and of seventy-seven thousand above 
twenty-one, it is true either that they cannot read or 
that they cannot write. 

The days that are passing over us are serious in 
the last degree, because it is very evident that our 
present difficulties — with the ignorant ballot, and 
with intimidation and trickery in close elections, and 
with the atrocious rule that to political victors belong 
all political spoils — will grow. Certainly the perils 
arising from the ignorant ballot, and from greed and 
fraud in contests for spoils greater than Csesar, 
Antony, and Lepidus fought for, will enlarge as cities 
grow more numerous and populous, and as political 
party patronage becomes fatter and vaster. 

We may escape from intimidation at last, but not 
in your generation or mine. There will be, while we 
are in the world, whole ranges of States, in which it 
will be at times hardly safe to vote against the will 
of the governing class, and where a perfectly free 
election will be the exception, and not the rule. 

Lord Macaulay, you know, in letters lately pub- 
lished, though written in 1858, predicted, that, when- 
ever we have a population of two hundred to the 
square mile, the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian parts of 
our civil polity will produce fatal effects. You say 
Macaulay is unduly full of tremor as to the future 



88 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

of republican institutions, and that France frightened 
him too much with her revolution ; but he is exceed- 
ingly cautious. Europe has only eighty inhabitants 
to the square mile ; and this historian says, that, when 
we have two hundred to the square mile, we shall be 
obliged to manage our politics on some other plan 
than that which supposes that all problems can be 
settled "by a majority of the citizens told by the 
head ; that is to say, by the poorest and most ignorant 
part of society." 

What do I want ? Am I here to make a plea for 
aristocratic institutions ? Massachusetts has a read- 
ing-test : New York has not. It was my fortune, or 
misfortune, to be born in the Empire State, and it is 
a grievous thing to me to know that that vast com- 
monwealth, which, above and west of the Highlands 
of the Hudson, is only a prolongation of New Eng- 
land, is politically under the heels of New York, 
below the Highlands, and would not be if the read- 
ing-test, which my State used to have, had been 
retained in the popular suffrage. In 1821 our State 
constitution was revised in New York ; and Martin 
Van Buren, when the reading-test was stricken out, 
predicted precisely the metropolitan evils which have 
arisen from the ignorant ballot in New- York City. 
Eighteen or twenty thousand votes in every munici- 
pal election in New York cannot read or write ; and 
they are a make-weight sufficient, in the hands of a 
few astute and unscrupulous men, to determine the 
result of any ordinary political contest in that city. 

Drop out her twenty thousand ignorant ballots, 



CAEICATUEED DEFINITIONS. 89 

and New-York City, politicians say, could, with no 
great difficulty, be restored to the control of her 
industrious and intelligent classes. If New York 
were London, and if her ignorant ballot were large 
in proportion to her size, not merely New-York 
State, but, I fear, New England, would be under the 
heels of the lower half of New- York City. 
- What are we to do about these things ? Civil-ser- 
vice reform is up for discussion from sea to sea; 
and why should not President Grant's repeated offi- 
cial words on the ballot be also up in this serious 
time for public thought ? In this distinguished audi- 
ence it cannot have escaped attention that his recom- 
mendation of the reading-test in the national vote 
has escaped attention. President Grant would take 
the ballot from nobody who has it now. He would 
let all men who have received the right to vote hold 
that right. But he would open the school doors; he 
would cause a common school education to be free as 
the air; he would make it as compulsory as the 
summer wind is upon the locks of the boy, trudging 
his way to the recitations of the morning ; he would 
remove every obstacle to the acquisition of a knowl- 
edge of reading and writing ; and then, after, say, the 
year 1890, he would refuse the ballot to everybody 
who has not learned to read and write. [Applause.] 
I am glad that Boston does not let this presidential 
recommendation sleep. 

We must be more thoughtful of what is to come 
in America, or much will come of which we do not 
think. Which is the more worthy of the culture of 



90 TEANSCENDENTALISM. 

a scholar in politics, — to throttle evils before, or only 
after, they themselves throttle us? 

Theodore Parker was a pastor in Boston, and he 
writes in his journal one day, concerning William 
Craft, the fugitive slave : " I inspected his arms, — a 
good revolver with six caps on, a large pistol, two 
small ones, a large dirk and a short one : all was 
right." That was efficient pastoral inspection of a 
parish. Yonder, on the slope of Beacon Hill, Theo- 
dore Parker performed the rites of marriage for 
William and Ellen Craft, two cultured colored 
people belonging to the society of which he had 
charge. At the conclusion of the ceremony he put a 
Bible into the left hand of the hunted black man ; 
and, as some one had laid a bowie-knife on the table, 
an inspiration of the moment caused Theodore Par- 
ker to put that weapon into the man's right hand. 
He then said to the escaped slave, " If you cannot 
use this without hating the man you strike against, 
your action will not be without sin; but to defend 
the honor of your wife, to defend your own life, and 
to save her and yourself from bondage, you have a 
right to use the Bible in your left hand and the 
bowie-knife in your right." Say, if you please, that 
all that was melodramatic ; say, if you will, that this 
style of action was Parker's first, and not his second 
or his third thought. I affirm, that, in the little 
cloud which we thought had in it no deluge, he fore- 
saw civil war; and that, if pastors all through the 
North had been equally efficient, there would have 
been no bloody rain at Gettysburg. [Applause.] 



CARICATURED DEFINITIONS. 91 



THE LECTURE. 

When Daniel Webster was asked how he ob- 
tained his clear ideas, he replied, " By attention to 
definitions." Dr. Johnson, whose business it was to 
explain words, was once riding on a rural road in 
Scotland, and, as he paused to water his horse at a 
wayside spring, he was requested by a woman of ad- 
vanced age to tell her how he, the great Dr. Johnson, 
author of a renowned dictionary, could possibly have 
defined the word "pastern" "the knee of a horse." 
"Ignorance, madam," was the reply, — "pure igno- 
rance." For one, if I am forced to make a confession 
as to my personal difficulties with Orthodoxy of the 
scholarly type, I must use, as perhaps many another 
student might, both Webster's and Johnson's phrases 
as the outlines of the story. Before I attended to 
definitions, I had difficulties : after I attended to 
them in the spirit of the scientific method, my own 
serious account to myself of the origin of my per- 
plexities was, in most cases, given in Johnson's words, 
"Ignorance, pure ignorance." 

Theodore Parker's chief intellectual fault was 
inadequate attention to definitions. As a conse- 
quence, his caricatures or misconceptions of Chris- 
tian truth were many and ghastly. I cannot discuss 
them all ; but in addition to his failure to distinguish 
between intuition and instinct, and between inspira- 
tion and illumination, it must be said, in continuance 
of the list of his chief errors : — 

5. He did not carefully distinguish from each other 
inspiration and dictation. 



92 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

When Benjamin Franklin was a young man, one 
of his hungriest desires was to acquire a perfect 
style of writing; and, as he admired Addison more 
than any other author, he was accustomed to take an 
essay of the " Spectator," and make very full notes of 
all its thoughts, images, sentiments, and of some few 
of the phrases. He then would place his manuscript 
in his drawer, wait several weeks, or until he had 
forgotten the language of the original, and then 
would take his memoranda, and write out an essay 
including every idea, every pulse of emotion, every 
flash of imagination, that he had transferred from 
Addison to his notes. Then he would compare his 
work with the original, and humiliate himself by the 
contrast of his own uncouth rhetorical garment with 
Addison's perfect robe of flowing silk. He studied 
how to improve his crabbed, cold, or obscure phrases 
by the light of Addison's noon of luminousness and 
imaginative and moral heat. Now, Franklin's essay 
was, you would say in such a case, not dictated by 
Addison, but was inspired by Addison. 

Plainly there is a difference between inspiration 
and dictation. Orthodoxy believes the Bible to be 
inspired; and her definition of inspiration is the 
gift of infallibility in teaching moral and religious 
truth. But, by inspiration thus defined, Orthodoxy 
does not mean dictation. She means that the Bible 
is as full of God as Franklin's echoed essay was of 
Addison. As in his essay there were both an Addi- 
sonian and a Franklinian element, so, speaking 
roundly, there are in the Bible a divine and a human 



CARICATURED DEFINITIONS. 93 

element ; but the latter is swallowed up in the for- 
mer even more completely than the Franklinian was 
in the Addisonian. All the thought in Franklin's 
essay is, by supposition, Addison's, and some of the 
phrases are his ; but Franklin's words are there. All 
the moral and religious thought of the Bible is, ac- 
cording to the definition of inspiration, divine, and 
so are some of the phrases ; but human words are 
there. 

The chief proof, after all, that the Bible is good 
food, is the eating of it. The healing efficacy of a 
medicine when it is used is the demonstration that it 
is good. Now, the world has been eating the Bible as 
it never ate any other book, and the Bible has been 
saturating the veins of the ages as they were never 
saturated by the food derived from any other volume ; 
but there is no spiritual disease that you can point 
to that is the outcome of biblical inculcation. We 
all feel sure that it would be better than well for the 
world, if all the precepts of this volume were ab- 
sorbed and transmuted into the actions of men. The 
astounding fact is, that the Bible is the only book in the 
World that ivill bear fidl and permanent translation into 
life. The careless and superficial sometimes do not 
distinguish from each other the biblical record and the 
biblical inculcation. I know that fearful things are 
recorded in the Bible concerning men, who, in some 
respects,were approved of God ; but it is the biblical 
inculcation which I pronounce free from adulterate 
elements, not the biblical record. Of course, in a 
mirror held up before the human heart, there will be 



94 TKANSCENDENTALISM. 

reflected blotches ; but the inculcation of the Scrip- 
tures, from the beginning to the end of the sixty -six 
pamphlets, is known by experience to be free from 
adulterate elements ; and I defy the world to show 
any disease that ever has come from the absorption 
into the veins of the ages of the biblical inculcation. 
[Applause.] And, moreover, I defy the ages to show 
any other book that could be absorbed thus in its 
inculcations, and not produce dizziness of the head, 
pimples on the skin, staggering at last, and the sow- 
ing of dragon's teeth. [Applause.] 

There is something very peculiar about this one 
book, in the incontrovertible fact that its inculca- 
tions are preserved from such error as would work 
out, in experience, moral disease in the world. Plato 
taught such doctrines, that if the world had followed 
him as it has the Bible, and had absorbed not his 
account of men's vices, but his positive inculcation, 
we to-day should be living in barracks, and we could 
not know who are our brothers, and who are our 
sisters. (Geote's Plato, TJie Republic, " Social 
Laws.") There was in Plato, you say, inspiration. 
Very well. His inculcation under what you call 
inspiration, and I call illumination, would, as every 
scholar knows, have turned this fat world into a 
pasture-ground for the intellectual and powerful on 
the one side ; but the poor on the other side it would 
have ground down into the position of unaspiring 
and hopeless hewers of wood and drawers of water ; 
and, worse than that, it would have quenched the 
divinest spark in natural religion, — family life. 
[Applause.] 



CARICATURED DEFINITIONS. 95 

Dictation and plenary inspiration are not the 
same. I avoid technical terms here ; but you must 
allow me, since Theodore Parker so often spoke 
against the plenary inspiration of the Bible, to say, 
that, by plenary inspiration, Orthodoxy does not 
mean verbal inspiration. Franklin's essay was plen- 
arily, but not always verbally, inspired by Addison. # 
If the Bible is written by dictation or verbal inspira- 
tion, as Theodore Parker often taught that Orthodox 
scholarship supposes that it is, even then it would 
not be at all clear that any translation of the Bible 
is verbally inspired. If any thing was dictated, of 
course, only the original was dictated. 

In places I believe we have in the Bible absolute 
dictation ; and yet inspiration and dictation are two 
things ; and the difference between them is worth 
pointing out when Orthodoxy is held responsible for 
a caricature of her definition, and when men are 
thrown into unrest on this point, as if they were called 
on to believe self-contradiction. The fact that all 
portions of the Bible are inspired does not imply at 
all that King James's version, or the German, or the 
French, or the Hindostanee, or any other, is dictated 
by the Holy Ghost. Even these versions, however, 
are full of God, as Franklin's essay was of Addison, 
and fuller. They, too, will bear translation into life. 
Sometimes, as in the Decalogue and the Sermon on 
the Mount, and in transfigured Psalm and prophecy, 
it well may be that we have in the original, words 
which came not by the will of man. 

There are three degrees of inspiration ; and the 



96 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

distinctions between them are not manufactured by 
me, here and now, to meet the exigency of this dis- 
cussion : they are as old as John Locke. It is 
commonplace in religious science to speak of the 
inspiration of superintendence, as in Acts or Chroni- 
cles ; the inspiration of elevation, as in the Psalms ; 
and the inspiration of suggestion, as in the Prophe- 
cies. The historical books of the Scriptures have 
been so superintended, that they are winnowed com- 
pletely of error in moral inculcation. But the 
inspiration of superintendence is the lowest degree 
of inspiration. We come to the great Psalms, which 
assuredly have no equals in literature, and which are 
palpably rained out of a higher sky than unassisted 
human genius has dropped its productions from. 
These Psalms, we say, are examples of the inspiration 
of elevation. But we have a yet higher range of the 
action of inspiration in passages like the distinct 
predictions that the Jews should be scattered among 
all nations, and nevertheless preserved as a separate 
people, as they have been ; or that Jerusalem should 
be destroyed, as it was ; or that there should come a 
supreme Teacher of the race, as he has come. We 
find in the biblical record unmistakably prophetic 
passages, and these are seals of the inspiration of 
suggestion ; for they could have been written only 
by suggestion. Infidelity never yet has made it 
clear that the Old-Testament predictions concerning 
the Jews have not been fulfilled. Rationalism, in 
Germany, whenever it takes up that topic, drops it 
like hot iron. " What is a short proof of inspira- 



CARICATTTKED DEFINITIONS. 97 

tion ? " said Frederic the Great to his chaplain. 
" The Jews, your majesty," was the answer. If there 
be in the Bible a single passage that is plainly 
prophetic, there is in that passage a very peculiar 
proof of its own divine origin. We have our Lord 
pointing out the prophecies concerning himself, and 
he makes it a reason why we should turn to the Old 
Testament, that they are. they which testify of him. 
Now, if there be some passages of the Bible that 
contain these prophetic announcements, then the 
Teacher thus announced is divinely attested, and we 
are to listen to him. 

If, however, we stand simply on the amazing fact 
of the moral and religious winnowedness of Scrip- 
ture, we have also a divine attestation. That win- 
nowedness is providential. What God does he 
means to do. He has done this for the Bible, — he 
has kept it free from moral and religious error in its 
inculcations.. He has done that for no other book; 
and what he has done he from the first intended to 
do. Therefore the very fact of the winnowedness 
of the Bible is proof of a divine superintendence 
over it. 

Superintendence, elevation, suggestion, are differ- 
ent degrees of inspiration, which is of one kind. 
But inspiration and illumination, according to estab- 
lished definitions, differ in kind, and not merely in 
degree ; for inspiration, as a term in religious science, 
— I am not talking of popular literature, — always 
carries with it the idea of winnowedness as to moral 
and religious truth. 



98 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

There is nothing in the intuitive ranges of truth 
that comes into collision with biblical inculcation ; but 
there is no other sacred booh on the globe which those 
same ranges of axiomatic moral truth do not pierce 
through and through and through in more places than 
ever knight'' s sword went through an opponent's shield, 
A few brilliants plucked out of much mire are the 
texts sometimes cited to us from the sacred literature 
of India, China, Arabia, Greece, and Home. I defy 
those who seem to be dazzled by these fragments, to 
read before any mixed company of cultivated men 
and women the complete inculcations of the Vedas, 
Shastas, and Koran. Those books have been ab- 
sorbed into the veins of nations ; and we know what 
diseases have been the result. They must be tried by 
the stern tests which the Bible endures; that is, by 
intuition, instinct, experiment, and syllogism. All the 
sacred literatures of the world come into collision 
with the intuitions of conscience, or with the dic- 
tates of long experience, except that one strange 
volume, coming from a remoter antiquity than any 
other sacred book, and read to-day in two hundred 
languages of the globe, and kept so pure in spite of 
all the tempests of time that have swept through 
its sky, that above the highest heavens opened to us 
by genius, and beyond all our latest and loftiest 
ideals, the biblical azure spreads out as noon risen on 
mid-noon. [Applause.] 

6. Theodore Parker was not careful enough to dis- 
tinguish between inspiration and revelation. 

By revelation I mean all self-manifestation of God, 



CAKICATUKED DEFINITIONS. 99 

in his words and his works both : inspiration is his 
self-manifestation in the Scriptures alone. Allow me 
to assert, face to face with the learning of this audi- 
ence, in the presence of which I speak with sincere 
deference, that Christianity would stand on the basis 
of revelation, — that is, on the self-manifestation of 
God in his works, including the facts of the New- 
Testament history, — even if the doctrine of inspira- 
tion were all thrown to the winds. You have been 
taught too often by rationalism that Christianity 
stands or falls on the truth of the doctrine of inspi- 
ration, whereas the nature and the degree of inspira- 
tion are questions between Christians themselves. 
Christianity, as a redemptive system, might stand on 
the great facts of the New Testament, if they were 
known as historic only, and the New-Testament 
literature were not inspired at all. Religion based 
on axiomatic moral truth would stand on revelation 
thus defined, even if inspiration were given up as a 
dream. [Applause.] 

Will you remember that the configuration of New 
England is the same at midnight and at noon ? It is 
my fortune to be a flying scout, or a kind of outlook 
committee, for my learned brethren here, and I carry 
a guide-book to this delicious nook of the round 
world; but what if I should lose that volume? 
Would not the Merrimack continue to be the most 
industrious river within your borders, the Connecti- 
cut the most majestic, the White Hills and the Green 
Mountains the most stately of your elevations? 
Would there be any gleaming shore on your coast, 



100 TEANSCEKDENTALISM. 

where the Atlantic surge plays through the reeds, 
that would change its outline at all by day or by 
night because of the loss of my guide-book ? Would 
not north and south, east and west, be just the 
same ? Inspiration gives us a guide-book : it does not 
create the landscape. Our human reason, compared 
with inspiration, is as starlight contrasted with the 
sunlight ; but the landscape of our relations to God 
is just the same whether it be illumined or left in 
obscurity. We might trace out by starlight much 
of the map. The sun of inspiration arises, and we 
know the Merrimack and Connecticut as never be- 
fore; but the sun did not create the Merrimack or 
the Connecticut. On all our shores the orb of day 
shows to the eye the distinction between rock and 
wave ; but it does not create that distinction, which 
we not dimly knew before by the noises in the dark, 
and by the wrecks. 

There is a soul, and there is a God ; and, since law 
is universal, there must be conditions of harmony 
between the soul and God. Since the soul is made on 
a plan, there must be natural conditions of its peace, 
both with itself and with God; and these conditions 
are not altered by being revealed. [Applause.] New- 
ton did not make the law of gravitation by discover- 
ing it, did he ? The Bible does not create, it reveals, 
the nature of things. As long as it remains true 
that there is a best way to live, it will be best to 
live the best way ; and religion is very evidently 
safe, whether the Bible stands or falls. [Applause.] 

7. Theodore Parker did not carefully distinguish 



CAKICATUEED DEFINITIONS. 101 

from each other the supernatural and the unnatu- 
ral. 

There are three kinds of natural laws, — physical, 
organic, and moral. It is very important to distin- 
guish these three from each other ; for penalty under 
the one class of laws does not always carry with it 
penalty under the others. A pirate may enjoy good 
health, and yet lose his desire to be holy, and thus 
be blessed under the organic, but cursed under the 
moral, natural laws. A Christian, if he is thrown 
into the sea, will sink in spite of his being a saint ; 
that is, he will be condemned under the physical law 
of gravitation, although blessed under the moral. 
We are stupid creatures; and so we ask naturally 
whether those on whom the Tower of Siloam fell 
were sinners above all others. "Were those who per- 
ished in the Ashtabula horror sinners above all 
others ? A sweet singer — one whose words of mel- 
ody will, I hope, for some centuries yet, prolong his 
usefulness on this and every other continent — may 
have been rapt away to heaven in a bliss which his 
own best poems express only as the spark expresses 
the noon. But there was somewhere and somehow a 
violation of physical law, and the penalty was paid. 
While that penalty was in process of execution, the 
bliss of obedience to the moral law may have been 
descending also ; and thus, out of the fire and the 
ice, and the jaws of unimaginable physical agony, this 
man may have been caught up into eternal peace. 
[Applause.] 

The distinction between the physical, organic, and 



102 TRANSCENDENTALISM. . 

moral natural laws, however, is not as important as 
that between the higher and the lower natural laws. 
Do you not admit that gravitation, a physical law, is 
lower than the organic force that builds animal and 
vegetable tissues ? In the growth of the elms on the 
Boston mall yonder, is not gravitation seized upon 
by some power superior to itself, and is not matter 
made to act as gravitation does not wish ? 

Is it not a common assertion of science, that chem- 
ical forces are counteracted by the organic forces 
which build up living tissues? Has not my will 
power to counteract the law of gravitation ? A 
higher may anywhere counteract a lower natural law. 
Scientific Theism does not admit that all there is 
of God is in natural law. He transcends nature: 
therefore he may reach down into it, as I, with the 
force of my will, reach into the law of gravitation. 
If he counteracts nature, his action is supernatural, but 
it is not unnatural. 

Charles Darwin and your Archbishop Butler say 
that the only clear meaning of the word " natural " is 
" stated, fixed, regular," and that " it just as much re- 
quires and presupposes an intelligent agent to effect 
any thing statedly, fixedly, regularly, that is, natu- 
rally, as it does to effect it for once, that is, supernat- 
urally " (Butler's Analogy, part i. chap, i., cited 
as a motto in Darwin's Origin of Species'). Accord- 
ing to Darwin and Butler, therefore, a natural law 
is simply the usual, fixed, regular method of the 
Divine Action. A miracle is unusual Divine Action. 
hi the former we see the Divine Immanency in Nature ; 



CARICATURED DEFINITIONS. 103 

in the latter the Divine Transcendency beyond it. In 
fundamental principle a miracle is only the subjec 
tion of a lower to a higher law, and therefore, al- 
though supernatural, it is not unnatural. (Art. on 
"Miracles," Smith's Bible Dictionary.') But Theo- 
dore Parker taught that " a miracle is as impossible 
as a round triangle " (Weiss's Life of Parker, vol. 
ii. p. 452), because it involves a self-contradiction. 
Brought up in the benighted New-England and Ger- 
man schools called evangelical, it never entered my 
head that self-contradiction was involved in the 
supernatural ; for I was trained to think that there 
is a distinction between the supernatural and the 
unnatural. 

Mr. Furness of Philadelphia says that a marvel- 
lous character, such as our Lord was, must be ex- 
pected to do marvellous works. We know, that, 
when men are illumined by the poetic trance, they 
have capacities that no other mood gives them. 
There are lofty zones in human experience, and, 
when we are in them, we can do much which we can 
do in none of our lower zones. What if a man 
should appear filled with a life that leaves him in 
constant communication with God ? What if there 
should come into existence a sinless soul ? What if 
it should remain sinless ? What if there should 
appear in history a being in this sense above nature, 
is it not to be expected that he will have power over 
nature, and perform works above nature ? Endowed 
as the Author of Christianity was, we should natu- 
rally expect from that supernatural endowment 
works not unnatural, but supernatural. [Applause.] 



104 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

It is Parker's teaching that said the resurrection 
has "no evidence in its favor." De Wette, whose 
book he translated, affirmed in his latest volume, as 
I showed you the other day, that the fact of the res- 
urrection, although a mystery that cannot be dissi- 
pated hangs over the way and manner of it, cannot 
be brought into doubt, any more than the assassina- 
tion of Caesar. 

Theodore Parker, in his middle life, stood vigor- 
ously for the propositions which he reached at the 
Divinity School at Cambridge and in West Roxbury. 
He was attacked too early. He says himself that he 
had not completed his system of thought. But he 
was attacked vigorously ; and with the spirit of his 
grandfather, who led the first charge on the British 
troops, he stood up and vehemently defended himself. 
[Applause.] But that early attack caused some of 
his crudities to crystallize speedily. He was after- 
ward too much absorbed in vast philanthropic enter- 
prises to be an exact philosopher in metaphysics or 
ethics. He never made himself quite clear in these 
sciences, or even in the latest biblical research. His 
own master, De Wette, went far beyond him, and 
admitted, in the face of German scholarship, that the 
resurrection can be proved to be an historic certitude. 
Theodore Parker, although De Wette did not make 
that admission till 1849, lived ten years longer, and 
never made it. 

Attacked early, and defending his unformed opin- 
ions vigorously, Parker's scheme of thought crystal- 
lized in its crude condition. Theodore Parker's also- 



CAKICATURED DEFINITIONS. 105 

lute religion is not a Boston, hut a West Roxbury creed. 
[Applause.] It is the speculation of a very young 
man, besides. 

8. Theodore Parker seemed to understand little 
of the distinction between belief and faith. 

He never misconceived Orthodoxy more mon- 
strously than when he said, " It is this false theology, 
with its vicarious atonement, salvation without moral- 
ity or piety, only by belief in absurd doctrines, which 
has bewitched the leading nations of the earth with 
such practical mischief" (Weiss, Life of Theodore 
Parker, vol. ii. p. 497). Gentlemen, is that Ortho- 
doxy ? [Cries of « No ! " « No ! " " No ! "] This audi- 
ence says that this is not a fair statement : I therefore 
shall undertake to call it a caricature. It is omni- 
present in Parker's works. Whether it was a dis- 
honest representation I care not to determine. My 
general feeling is, that Theodore Parker was honest. 
He rarely came into companionship with Orthodox 
scholars of the first rank : when he did, he seemed 
to be pleased and softened, and was, in many respects, 
another man. Attacked, he always stood up with 
the spirit of the drum-major of Lexington under his 
waistcoat. [Applause.] 

What is saving faith ? What is the difference be- 
tween belief and faith ? I venture much ; but I shall 
be corrected swiftly here if I am wrong. Saving 
faith, rightly defined, is — 

1. A conviction of the intellect that God, or God 
in Christ is, and 

2. An affectionate choice of the heart that God, or 



106 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

God in Christ, should be, both our Saviour and our 
Lord. 

The first half of this definition is belief; the whole 
is faith. All of it without the last two words would 
be merely religiosity, and not religion. There is noth- 
ing in that definition which teaches that a man is 
saved by opinion irrespective of character. Belief is 
assent, faith is consent, to God as both Saviour and 
Lord. 

On April 19, 1775, a rider on a horse flecked with 
blood and foam brought to the city of Worcester the 
news of the battle of Lexington, in which Theodore 
Parker's grandfather captured the first British gun. 
The horse fell dead on the main street of the city, 
and on another steed the rider passed westward with 
his news. Some of those who heard the intelligence 
were loyal, and some were disloyal. They all heard 
that there had been a victory of the American troops 
over the Britisli, and they all believed the report. 
Now, was there any political virtue or vice in the 
belief by the Tory in Worcester that there had been 
a victory over the British ? Was there any political 
virtue or vice in the belief by the patriot yonder that 
there had been a victory over the British ? Neither 
the one nor the other. Where, then, did the political 
virtue or political vice come in? Why, when your 
Tory at Worcester heard of the victory, he believed 
the report, and was sorry ; and was so sorry, that he 
took up arms against his own people. When the 
patriot heard the report, he believed it and was glad ; 
and was so glad, that he took up arms and put him- 



CARICATURED DEFINITIONS. 107 

self side by side with the stalwart shoulders of Par- 
ker's grandfather. [Applause.] In that attitude of 
the heart lay the political virtue or political vice. 
Just so, in the government of the universe, we all 
hear that God is our Saviour and Lord, and we all 
believe this, and so do all the devils, and tremble. Is 
there any virtue or vice in that belief taken alone ? 
None whatever. But some of us believe this, and 
are sorry. We turn aside, and, although we have 
assent, we have no consent to God ; and we take up 
arms against the fact that he is our Saviour and Lord. 
Others of us believe this, and by divine grace are 
glad ; we have assent and consent both ; we come 
into the mood of total, affectionate, irreversible self- 
surrender to God, not merely as a Saviour, but also 
as Lord. When we are in that mood of rejoicing 
loyalty to God, we have saving faith, and never till 
then. [Applause.] How can salvation be obtained 
by assent alone, that is, by opinion merely ? What 
is salvation ? It is permanent deliverance from both 
the love of sin and the guilt of sin. Accepting God 
gladly as Saviour, we are delivered from the guilt of 
sin, and, accepting him gladly as Lord, we are deliv- 
ered from the love of sin. Only when we accept 
God as both Saviour and Lord are we loyal ; only 
when we are affectionately glad to take him as both 
are we or can we be at peace. When we believe the 
news that he is Saviour and Lord, and are glad, and 
so glad as to face the foe, we are in safety. [Ap- 
plause.] 



V. 

THEODORE PARKER ON THE GUILT OP SIN. 

THE SIXTY-THIRD LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC- 
TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE JAN. 29. 



<j>epei (f>epovT , ) turiva 6' 6 Kaivov 
ui/xvei 6e /ilfj,vovTog kv XP° V V Awg", 
iradelv tov Ip^avra • Qeafiiov yap. 

^Eschylus : Agamemnon, 1562. 



'Elnep korlv i] nafajityaTos 
Liar} gvvedpog Zrjvbg upxaioig vo/j-ocg. 

Sophocles: (Edipus, 1381. 



V. 



THEODORE PARKER ON THE GUILT OF 
SIN. 

PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. 

If every one would mend one, then all would be 
amended. If every one would mend one, no doubt 
the union of multitudinous personal efforts would 
seem to produce wholesale conversions; but these 
would be only the massed piecemeal results of indi- 
vidual faithfulness. The snows that descend the 
Alps in avalanches fall out of the sky, flake by flake. 
If every one were to mend one, undoubtedly there 
would appear to be some excitement in society. If 
every one were to mend one, no doubt in the process 
some mistakes would be made, even by the conscien- 
tious. But, if every one would mend one, there 
would come into society a consciousness of the Divine 
Omnipresence, and we should forget men, and lose 
sight of ourselves, in an overshadowing awe of a 
Power not ourselves. It is an endlessly suggestive 
fact, that all deeply-conscientious action brings to the 
actor, and often to the beholder, a sense of the near- 
ness of a Power not of man. A perfectly holy choice 

111 



112 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

makes tangible to the soul the touch of the Unseen 
Holy. Boston means to do her duty, and therefore 
already she feels that God is here. While her holy 
choice continues, that feeling will continue ; and, if 
that feeling continues long, the fashion of her coun- 
tenance will be altered. 

You, men of letters and of the learned professions ; 
you, students ; and you, who call yourselves highly cul- 
tured, will agree with Cicero, will you not, when he 
says, that, in the great speeches of Demosthenes, there 
is always something immense and infinite, and not of 
man? You are ready to affirm, are you not, with 
Matthew Arnold, that there is in human history a 
Power not ourselves that makes for righteousness ? 
Now, if we could live under the fructifying although 
insufferable light of the scientific certainty that this 
Power not only was, but is, and is to come, and that 
it is here ; if we could rise up, every one desiring to 
mend another, and go into society, in the name of 
Something immense and infinite, that is not of society, 
although in it, we should be in the right mood to be 
illuminated of the Holy Spirit this winter in Boston, 
and so to be useful among the poor, and in the broth- 
els, and in the gambling-saloons, and in the dens of 
drunkenness. 

These places are to be visited. It was no empty 
bugle-note you heard yesterday on that matter of 
personal visitation among the destitute and degraded. 
Astounding as it seems that we are to go into these 
haunts of vice ; women to go into places of infamy 
to find their fallen sisters, young men into places of 



THEODORE PARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 113 

drunkenness to find their brothers, middle-aged men 
into the places where human forms sit as spiders 
behind the webs of greed to draw in whatever souls 
can be tempted by the coarser side ; however amaz- 
ing it may seem that these things are to be done in 
Boston, they have been done in Edinburgh, London, 
New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. In the 
next three months you will see them done here. 
[Applause.] Some of you will be doing them soon. 
Immense wants are to be met by immense truths. 
The law of supply and demand, the commercial prin- 
ciple, is God's law of revivals. 

Are there any who think that Boston is learning 
to rely on scepticism ? There is no scholarly scepti- 
cism in Boston. [Applause.] In this city, there 
have been three attempts to found a new religion, 
and each effort looks now, on the boughs of time, 
like a last year's bird's nest. [Applause.] 

You remember that when Timothy Dwight began 
his career at Yale College, in 1795, only one student 
out of the whole undergraduate membership of that 
university remained at the Lord's Supper. Young 
men there were accustomed to name themselves after 
the French infidels. The college was full of unre- 
portable vices. Those were the days, says Lyman 
Beecher, who was then in college, when boys, as 
they dressed flax in the barn, read Tom Paine, and 
believed him. For a long period our land had been 
full of enthusiasm for France. Jefferson had just 
come to the presidential chair. There was hardly a 
leading individual in public life, in his administration, 



114 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

who held what are now called evangelical opinions. 
President Dwight met a sceptical senior class in 
Yale College, and they urged him to discuss the ques- 
tion of the inspiration of the Scriptures. He dis- 
cussed it ; he heard them oppose what he regarded as 
Christian established truth; he urged them to be 
thorough. He listened to their best attacks patiently, 
and answered them fully and fairly. For six months 
he delivered massive courses of thought against scio- 
lism in religious science ; and from that time infi- 
delity ran into hiding-holes in Yale College. 

Harvard University, yonder, dear to me as my 
Alma Mater, as are the ruddy drops that visit this sad 
heart, was as full as Yale of the unrest of this French 
scepticism at the end of the Revolution. Lafayette 
turned the whole heart of our people toward France. 
Young men in Harvard, as often as in Yale, were 
proud to name themselves after the French infidels. 
The atrociously shallow and unclean, but brilliant and 
audacious, Parisian infidelity of the period — a scheme 
of thought which we now regard with pity, and which 
no scholar cares to hear named — was then attrac- 
tive even to scholarly undergraduates. Harvard 
never had a President Dwight to take the poison of 
our French period out of her veins. [Applause.] 
In that fact begins the history of Boston scepticism. 
This is frank speech ; it is not bitter. It is the sad 
truth ; but it will do to tell this now and here, for 
we have slowly outgrown the poison. 

It lay in the veins of Harvard and Eastern Massa- 
chusetts all the more deeply, and had the more sor- 



THEODORE PARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 115 

cerous effect, because of the half-way covenant which 
many Massachusetts churches adopted, admitting to 
the communion those who did not pretend to have 
entered on a new life at all ; and this simply under 
the political pressure of the time, or because, for a 
while in Massachusetts, only church-members could 
vote. 

While these powerful e^vils of the half-way cove- 
nant and French infidelity were yet operative, there 
was an attempt to found a new religion. And this 
religion has had many names, which it would be in- 
vidious to mention ; but it was always of a liberal sort. 
I beg you not to understand me to be in other than 
the mood of tears. There is a scholarly liberalism, a 
learned liberalism ; there is also a limp, lavender 
liberalism. It was limp, lavender liberalism that we 
had ingrafted upon New England in this sickly time, 
when French atheism and the half-way covenant had 
prepared the way for the setting of that scion. I do 
not see that the grafted bough has produced fruit of 
any great importance ; certainly it is to be judged 
by what it has brought forth. The old boughs are 
not only the more vigorous, but they produce fruit 
that is more likely to satisfy the fathomless human 
hunger for the bread of life. Scholarship has tried 
limp, lavender liberalism, and has come to believe in 
a learned, large, Christian liberalism that has in it not 
much lavender, and that is not limp, simply because 
the nature of things on which religious science is 
founded is not all lavender, and is not limp at all. 
[Applause.] 



116 TEANSCENDENTALISM. 

Boston, in the name of exact science, believes, I 
undertake to say, that until a man loves what God 
loves, and hates what God hates, it is ill with him, 
and that it will continue to be ill until that disso- 
nance ceases. [Applause.] That simple creed taken 
alone would be enough to empower and equip us for 
religious activity, and even 

" To put a soul 
Under the ribs of death." 

On all sides of us men are living in the love of what 
God hates, and in the hate of what God loves. I 
hold it to be incontrovertible, that all clear heads, 
the globe around, are now united in the conviction, 
that, until a man acquires similarity of feeling with 
God, it is ill with him. They are, I think, almost 
unanimously united in the conviction, that, if a man 
goes through life cultivating dissimilarity of feeling 
with God, this prolonged personal dissonance may 
become chronic, and he may fall into a final perma- 
nence of bad character, and this under the momentum 
of evil habit, and by the simple law of the self-propa- 
gating power of sin. That stupendous and irresisti- 
ble natural law by which men fall into final perma- 
nence of character, either good or bad, is in operation 
around us. We are called upon, joining hands with 
that law, that is, with Almighty God, to live in simi- 
larity of feeling with him, and then to cast ourselves 
into organizing and redemptive conflict for the deliv- 
erance of men from dissonance with God. In the 
name of tremorless certainty we must proclaim every- 



THEODORE PARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 117 

where, that as a thing cannot be and not be at the 
same time and in the same sense, so, unless a man 
loves what God loves, and hates what God hates, 
unless a man comes into affectionate, total, irrever- 
sible self-surrender to God as both Saviour and Lord, 
it is ill with him, and must be so until the dissonance 
ceases ; and that the dissonance is assuredly less and 
less likely to cease, the longer it continues. [Ap- 
plause.] 

THE LECTURE. 

Keep, my friends, the hush of what Hegel calls 
the highest act of the human spirit, prayer, in this 
assembly while we ask whether there is such a thing 
in man as enmity of the heart against God. Theo- 
dore Parker said there is not. When the unclean 
sweeper of chimneys, a dissipated man, comes into 
the presence of a pure and queenly woman, he 
understands his leprosy, perhaps for the first time, 
simply because it is brought into contrast with that 
virtue of which Milton said, — 

' ' So dear to Heaven is saintly chastity, 
That, when a soul is found sincerely so, 
Ten thousand liveried angels lackey her, 
And in clear dream and solemn vision 
Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear. ' ' 

Comus, 453. 

It is only when a hush, produced by the sense of 
the Divine Omnipresence, fills the chambers of phi- 
losophy, that they are fit places in which to discuss 
the fact of sin. Not always in Paris has that condi- 



118 -TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

tion been fulfilled, not always at Berlin or London, 
not always in Boston. Our ears are too gross to 
hear the innermost truths of conscience until we feel 
the breath of eternity on our cheeks. But what a 
man sees only in his best moments as truth is truth 
in all moments. As now there falls a hushed sense 
of the Unseen Holy upon this city of scholarship, it 
is a fit time to raise the question whether sin is a 
self-evident fact in human experience. Theodore 
Parker affirmed that it is not. 

James Freeman Clarke, when Theodore Parker 
was in Italy in 1859, went into the pulpit of the 
latter, and was so faithful, both to science and to 
friendship, as to criticise Parker's scheme of thought 
for not adequately recognizing the significance of 
the fact of sin. In reply to that criticism, there 
came to Mr. Clarke, from Italy, a letter, which he 
gave to Theodore Parker's biographer, who has given 
it to the world. It is a painful duty of mine to-day 
to cite this latest and frankest expression of Theo- 
dore Parker's views. In his youth Parker had writ- 
ten : " I think no sin can make an indelible mark on 
what I call the soul. I think sin makes little mark 
on the soul, for much of it is to be referred to causes 
exterior, even to the physical man, and much to the 
man's organization. Ninety-nine hundredths of sin 
are thus explicable. I am sure that sin, the result 
of man's circumstances, or of his organization, can 
make no permanent mark on the soul " (Weiss's Life 
of Parker, vol. i. p. 149). 

Were these not the crude opinions of a beginner 



THEODORE PARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 119 

in philosophy ? Did he hold these opinions through 
life? Substantially from his death-bed, Theodore 
Parker wrote from Italy, in 1860, to James Freeman 
Clarke : — 

" Many thanks for standing in my pnlpit and preaching 
about me and mine ; all the more thanks for the criticisms. Of 
course, I don't agree with your criticisms: if I had, I should not 
have given you occasion to make them. 

" Now a word about sin. It is a theological word, and is 
commonly pronounced ngsin-n-n-n! But I think the thing 
which ministers mean by ngsin-n-n-n has no more existence than 
phlogiston, which was once adopted to explain combustion. I 
find sins, i.e., conscious violations of natural right, but no sin, i.e., 
no conscious and intentional preference of wrong (as such) to 
right (as such) ; no condition of ' enmity against God. ' I sel- 
dom use the word ' sin : ' it is damaged phraseology, tainted by 
contact with infamous notions of man and God. I have some 
sermons of sin and of sins, which I may live long enough to pre- 
pare for printing, but also may not. 

" Deacon Wryface of the Hellfire Church says, ' Oh, I am a 
great sinner : I am one mass of sin all over ; the whole head is 
sick, and the whole heart faint. In me there dwelleth no good 
thing. There is no health in me.' — 'Well,' you say to him, 
'for once, deacon, I think you pretty near right; but you are 
not yet quite so bad as you talk. 

" ' What are the special sins you do commit? ' 

" ' Oh, there ain't any : I hain't got a bad habit in the world, 
— no, not one!' 

" ' Then what did you mean by saying just now that you 
were such a sinner? ' 

" ' Oh, I referred to my natur 9 : it is all ngsin-n-n-n .' 

" That is the short of it: all men are created equal in 
ngsin-n-n-n. 

"0 James! I think the Christian (!) doctrine of sin is the 



120 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

Devil's own, and I hate it, — hate it bitterly. Orthodox schol- 
ars say, 'In the heathen classics you find no consciousness of 
sin. ' It is very true : God be thanked for it ! 

"I would rather have a good, plump, hearty heathen, like 
Aristotle, or Demosthenes, or Fabius Maximus, than all the 
saints from Peter, James, and John (clokountes stuloi einai), down 
to the last one manufactured by the Roman Church ; I mean as 
those creatures are represented in art. For the actual men I 
have a reasonable respect ; they had some spunk in them ; while 
the statues even of Paul represent him ' as mean as a yaller dog. ' 
But let ngsin-n-n-n go " (Weiss's Life of Parker, vol. i. p. 151). 

Gentlemen, that is an amazing letter. The tone 
of it is unworthy of a cultured man, and is astound- 
ing in a dying man. Never would such words have 
been chosen by Channing, never by Emerson, and 
never by Parker himself, if there bad been behind 
his phrases a calm, scientific conviction that on this 
majestic theme he was philosophically right. There 
is in that letter an irritability, I had almost said a 
vulgarity, of tone, proceeding not from Theodore 
Parker's better nature, but largely, I think, from his 
fear that his positions as to sin would not bear the 
test of scientific criticism, and yet could not be 
wholly given up without giving up the very Malakoff 
and Redan of his absolute religion. 

Why, if you should adopt as an established truth 
the proposition that there is not to be found in man 
any intentional preference of wrong to right, or no 
enmity against God, and if you should carefully 
expurgate literature by that rule, how would Shak- 
speare look ? There is no such thing as preference 



THEODORE PARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 121 

of wrong to right, Theodore Parker says. If there 
were to be edited an edition of Shakspeare accord- 
ing to this principle, how much would be left of the 
naturalness of that mirror of humanity? We now 
have character after character in Shakspeare repre- 
sented as making evil a delight, and as knowing the 
right and approving it, and as abhorring the wrong 
and yet pursuing it. Your Shakspeare edited after 
the Parker principle, that there never is in man a 
preference of wrong to right, would be a limp, bone- 
less, flaccid, lavender thing. You would scorn to 
call such a Shakspeare a fair mirror of human life. 
You would find such an expurgated edition plenti- 
fully misleading in the study of man's nature. In 
the case supposed, you could not admit that Shak- 
speare is the prince of philosophers, as well as the 
prince of poets, and that he becomes both the one 
and the other simply by holding up his mirror to all 
that is. 

Were you to expurgate the laws of the civil gov- 
ernments of the world according to Parker's rule, 
where would justice be? Ask the gentlemen who 
every day stand in courts of justice, and administer 
in God's name the eternal law of right, and they will 
tell you, that the expurgation of our courts by the 
principle that there is no intentional preference of 
wrong to right would reduce legal equity to moral 
chaos ; and that every thing in law proceeds upon 
the supposition that man does choose the wrong 
when he knows it to be wrong. 

Where would philosophy be, if it were expurgated 



122 TBAJ^SCENDENTALISM. 

by the Parkerian principle ? We have, in the last 
twenty-five years, studied more deeply than ever 
before the subjective experiences of the human 
heart in the moral region. It is coming now to be 
one of the higest offices of philosophy to explore the 
deepest inmost of conscience, and to reveal to man 
the extent of that disturbance which must arise in 
his nature when he loves what God hates, and hates 
what God loves. It is now the highest office of phi- 
losophy to show man not only that he has con- 
science, but that conscience has him. 

I affirm, that, as men who love clear ideas, we do 
not want either philosophy, or law, or literature, 
expurgated according to Parker's principle ; but do 
you want theology expurgated by it ? Do you want 
this delicate little shoot you call religious science 
shut away from the healthy winds of criticism ? Is 
it to be kept behind the walls of some colossal au- 
thority, and not allowed to battle its way to its full 
size in all the tempests that strike it out of the north, 
south, east, or west ? How is religious science ever 
to become a stalwart oak, throwing out its boughs in 
every direction, vigorously and graciously, and no 
fear of tempests, unless it contend with all the 
shocks of criticism that beat on philosophy and law 
and literature? Keligious science must take her 
chances according to the law of the survival of the 
fittest. I maintain, that if you will not expurgate 
literature, law, and your philosophy, according to 
the principle that a man never has enmity against 
God, you must not expurgate your theology accord- 



THEODORE PARKER OX THE GUILT OE SIN. 123 

ing to that principle. [Applause.] We must not 
playfast and loose with the scientific tests of truth. 

Having already shown that Theodore Parker did 
not carefully distinguish intuition from instinct, or 
inspiration from iUumination, or inspiration from dic- 
tation, or the supernatural from the unnatural, or 
belief from faith, I must further afhrm that, he made 
no adequate distinction between human infirmity and 
human iniquity. [Applause.] 

"What are the chief points established by self-evi- 
dent truths, as to the fact of sin ? 

1. Moral good is what ought to be in acts of choice. 

2. Moral evil is what ought not to be in acts of 
choice. 

3. Conscience intuitively perceives the difference 
between what ought to be and what ought not to be 
in the soul's intentions or acts of choice. 

These are central definitions, and apprehensible, 
I hope. Remember that I do not say that conscience 
knows what ought to be in any matter of expediency 
outside of the soul. Strictly speaking, there is no 
right or wrong in external action taken -wholly 
apart from its motives : there is in such action only 
expediency or inexpediency. There may be physi- 
cal evil outside the field of motives ; but moral evil 
is to be found only in the acts of choice. Conscience 
intuitively perceives intentions, or choices, to be 
either good or bad. Here stands on one side of the 
will a motive, and on the other is another motive ; 
and, looking on what we mean to do, we decide 
whether we will do the best we know or not. [Ap- 



124 TKA^SCENDENTALISM. 

plause.] Eight and wrong in motives are pointed 
out by conscience, and not in merely external ac- 
tion. I do not know "by conscience, but only by 
judgment, whether it is best for me to vote for the 
electoral bill or not ; but I should vote for it if I 
were in Congress. [Applause.] 

There is in conscience the power of tasting mo- 
tives, just as in the tongue there is the power of 
tasting flavors. I know by the tongue whether a 
given fruit is bitter or sweet. No doubt we bring 
up the fruit to the lips by the hands ; no doubt we 
look at it with the eyes; no doubt we perceive its 
odor by the nostrils : but only by the tongue do 
we taste it. So, no doubt, the intellect is concerned 
in bringing up considerations before the inner tribu- 
nal ; but, after all, the moral character of our motives 
is tasted by a special power which we call conscience. 
This perceives intuitively the difference between a 
good intention and a bad. But a good motive is one 
which conscience not only pronounces right, but one 
which conscience says ought to rule the will. Two 
things are thus pointed out by conscience in motives, 
— rightness and oughtness. The former is per^ived 
intuitively ; the latter is felt instinctively. The 
oughtness is a mysterious, powerful constraint cast 
upon us by some force outside of ourselves, and 
operating through all our instincts. I am willing to 
define conscience as that which perceives and feels 
Tightness and oughtness in motives or intentions. 

You cannot go behind this rightness and. ought- 
ness which conscience points out. Why is this fruit 



THEODORE PARKER ON THE GUILT OF SEST. 125 

bitter to the human taste ? Why is this other sweet ? 
We are so made, that the tongue tastes here bitterness 
and there sweetness, and you cannot go behind that 
ultimate fact. You are so made, that, if you do what 
you know has behind it a wrong intention, there is a 
constraint brought upon you. You have violated 
the supreme law of things in the universe. You are 
in dissonance with your own nature; and there 
springs up in you, under the inflexible law of con- 
science, a sense of guilt. 

4. Conscience reveals, therefore, a moral law. 

5. That law is above the human will, and acts 
without, and even against, the consent of the will. 

6. There cannot be a thought without a being 
who thinks ; nor a law without a being who wills ; 
nor a moral l^w without a moral lawgiver. 

There must have been the thought of the right 
and of the good before there could have been a law 
promulgated in the universe supporting the right 
and the good. That thought of the right and the 
good, which must have gone before the law, could 
have existed only in a thinker. The choice of that 
thinker to promulgate a law eternally supporting the 
right and the good could have proceeded only from 
a righteous thinker. There cannot be a law with- 
out a being who wills ; for law is only the method 
of the operation of a will. That is Darwin, if you 
please. That is not Hackel, nor Huxley; but it is 
Charles Darwin, and ninety-five out of a hundred of 
all the foremost men of physical science. It is 
Archbishop Butler too, and Julius Miiller, and none 



126 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

the worse for that. [Applause.] There cannot be 
a moral law without a moral lawgiver. 

7. When, therefore, the will chooses to act from a 
motive which conscience pronounces evil, that act 
of the will is disobedience, not to abstract law only, 
but to God. 

8. Thus evil becomes sin. 

I have defined moral evil as that which ought not 
to be, or as that which is condemned by the moral law 
revealed by conscience. Sin is disobedience to the 
moral law considered as the revelation of a Personal 
Lawgiver. Sin is a choice of wrong motives. Per- 
sonal disloyalty to the Infinite Oughtness — that is 
sin. All agree to this latter definition; but the 
Somewhat, which I call the Infinite Oughtness, is to 
all men who think clearly, not merely a Somewhat, 
but a Someone. [Applause.] 

Let us now proceed cautiously, step by step, and 
convince ourselves that on this theme much may be 
placed beyond controversy by a simple statement 
of the acknowledged laws of the operation of con- 
science. 

9. It is incontrovertible, that man often hears a 
still small voice within him saying " I ought." 

Does anybody deny this ? I wish to be very ele- 
mentary, and to carry the assent of your minds point 
by point ; and I forewarn you here and now that 
immense consequences hang on your admission of 
these fundamental, simple principles. Be on your 
guard. Do you deny that sometimes we all hear a 
still small voice within us saying " I ought " ? If a 



THEODOEE PAEKER ON THE GUXLT OF SIN. 127 

man is conscious of any great defect in his organiza- 
tion, — intellectual, moral, or physical, — he does not 
blame himself for it ; but the instant a man violates 
a command of conscience uttered in this whispered 
"I ought," he blames himself. I may have limita- 
tions of my faculties, such that I never can amount 
to much ; but I do not blame myself. But, the in- 
stant I do what conscience pronounces wrong, that 
moment I know that I am to blame. That is human 
nature ; and Edmund Burke used to say, " I cannot 
alter the constitution of man." It is in every sane 
man to say " I ought." 

10. It is incontrovertible, that man often answers 
the voice which says " I ought " by saying " I will 
not." 

You doubt that ? Is it not a fact, certified to you 
by any narrative of your own experience, that you 
have multitudes of times replied to this still small 
voice "I ought," by a soft or vehement "I will 
not." 

11. It is incontrovertible, that instantly and inva- 
riably, after saying to " I ought " " I will not," a man 
must say, " I am not at peace with myself." 

12. It is incontrovertible, that he must say also, 
" I am not in fellowship with the nature of things." 

Why, this is only tautology. If a man has a pow- 
erful faculty within him that says one thing, and 
another powerful faculty which says another thing, 
there is within him civil war. Peace ends. He 
recognizes the condition of the republic of his 
faculties by his wails of unrest. He knows that the 



128 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

disturbance of his nature resulted from his saying 
" I will not " to the still small voice, " I ought." 

13. It is incontrovertible, that he must say also, 
" I have lost fellowship with God." 

What is there in sin more mysterious than the 
sense which always comes with it, that the stars in 
their courses fight against us when we do not say " I 
will " in response to " I ought " ? There is in the 
inner heavens a voice saying " Thou shalt," " Thou 
oughtest ; " and we reply to that celestial summons, 
"I will not: " and instantly out of the inner heavens 
falls on us a thunderbolt. It is by irreversible, 
natural law that every man who says " I will not," 
when the inner voice says " I ought," falls into disso- 
nance with himself, and into a feeling that the stars 
in their courses fight against him. There is nowhere 
a heart, given at all to sensitive self-study, that does 
not understand perfectly how the sun behind the sun 
may be put out by saying " I will not " to the still 
small voice which says " I ought." Grod causes the 
natural sun to rise on both the just and the unjust, 
but not the sun behind the sun. We are so made., that 
the only light of our inner sky is peace with our- 
selves. In the nature of things, the sun behind the 
sun comes not, and cannot come, forth for us, from 
the east, if we say "I will not," when conscience 
says " I ought." The simple refusal to follow that 
still small voice leaves a drought in the soul ; for it 
dries up the sweetest rains from the sky behind the 
sky. It is terrific, scientific, penetratingly human 
truth, that the sun behind the sun does not rise 




THEODOEE PAEKEE ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 129 

equally upon the just and the unjust ; and that the 
rains from the sky behind the sky do not fall, never 
have fallen, and in the nature of things never will or 
can fall, in this world or the next, equally upon the 
righteous and the unrighteous. [Applause.] 

14. It is incontrovertible, that he who is disloyal to 
the voice which says " I ought " must also say, " I 
ought to satisfy the injured majesty of the law I have 
violated. Sin creates an obligation to satisfy the in- 
jured majesty of the moral law. (See Julius Mul- 
ler, Doctrine of Sin, vol. i. pp. 1-200.) 

15. It is incontrovertible, that, in the absence of 
expiation, man forebodes punishment. 

That sounds like a theological and biblical propo- 
sition: it is simply an ethical and purely scientific 
one. It is what is taught everywhere in Shakspeare 
and the Greek poets. It is what is illustrated by all 
the history of Pagan sacrifices since the world began. 
If we are to estimate the strength of any human im- 
pulse by the work it will do, then this perception 
that sin creates an obligation to satisfy the injured 
majesty of the moral law must be presumed to have 
behind it a most powerful force. Again and again, 
age after age, it has shown itself to be stronger than 
love or death. There is nothing clearer than that a 
man is so made, that after he has been disloyal, after 
he has looked into the face of God, and said " I will 
not," he feels that this act has created an obligation 
which must in some way be discharged to satisfy the 
majesty and the moral right of the moral law. 



130 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

It is not a pleasant thing to say that that is the 
way a man is made ; but that is the way he is made. 
A liberal theology is one that looks at all the facts. 
"Instead of fashioning with great labor a theory 
that would account for all the facts," Theodore 
Parker, his biographer Mr. Weiss says, "overcame 
doubt by a humane and tender optimism " (Life of 
Parker, vol. i. p. 150). 

Gentlemen, there must be a philosophy that will 
account for all the facts of human nature, if we are 
ever to have a religious science; for whether you 
will or not think boldly, north, south, east, and 
west, men by and by will do so, and they will look 
into all these astounding certainties of human 
nature. When a man says "I ought," and then 
says " I will not," he must say, " I am not at peace 
with myself," " I am dropped out of fellowship with 
the nature of things," " I am not in fellowship with 
God," "The stars fight against me," "Nature is 
against me," "I ought, I ought to render satisfac- 
tion." That is the way Nature acts. Shakspeare 
was philosopher enough to make one of his characters 
say, when one complained that he was a man whom 
fortune had most cruelly scratched, that it was " too 
late to pare her nails now," and that " Fortune is a 
good lady, and will not have knaves thrive long 
under her " (AIVs Well that Ends Well, act v. sc. ii.). 
Even Shakspeare speaks of a " primrose way to the 
everlasting bonfire " (Macbeth, act ii. sc. i.), and of 
" the flowery way that leads to the broad gate and 



THEODORE PARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 131 

the great fire " (AWs Well that Ends Well, act. iv. sc. 
v.). Too late ! Probably Shakspeare meant some- 
thing by that phrase, and knew what he meant. 
For one, I think he meant that it is possible for a 
man to fall into a final permanency of character, 
hating what God loves, and loving what God hates. 

16. It is incontrovertible, that, even after a man 
disloyal to conscience has reformed, he has behind 
him an irreversible record of sin in the past. 

It will always remain true that he has been a de- 
serter; and therefore conscience will always leave 
him at far lower heights than those of peace, if he 
be not sure that some power beyond his own has sat- 
isfied the moral law. [Applause.] 

17. It is incontrovertible, that, when man is free 
from the love of sin, he is not free from constitu- 
tional apprehension as to the effect of the guilt of 
past sin on his personal future in this world and the 
next. 

18. It is incontrovertible, that the desire to be sure 
that the guilt of sin will be overlooked is one of the 
most powerful forces in human nature. 

19. It is incontrovertible, that an atonement may 
thus in the solitudes of conscience be scientifically 
known to be the desire of all nations ; that is, of all 
who have fallen into that disturbance of the moral 
nature which is called sin. [Applause.] 

20. The atonement which reason can prove is 
needed, revelation declares has been made. [Ap- 
plause.] 



VI. 

FINAL PERMANENCE OF MORAL CHARACTER. 

THE SIXTY-FOURTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC- 
TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE FEB. 5. 



Repeated sin impairs the judgment. 

He whose judgment is impaired sins repeatedly." 

Bhagvat Gheeta. 



TraTauyevq yap leyo 
napaftaciav ukvttoivov • 
altiva 6' kg rpiTov fievei. 

uEschylus: Theb.,742. 



VI. 



FINAL PERMANENCE OF MORAL CHAR- 
ACTER. 

PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. 

Bad advice, John Milton says, may slay not only 
a life, but an immortality. 

We have no right to advise the religiously irreso- 
lute to any thing which they might die doing, and 
die unsaved. Applying strenuously to practice that 
searching and transfiguring principle, from how much 
dawdling advice should we and those whom we coun- 
sel be delivered ! [Applause.] 

Not a few of us are likely to be called upon this 
winter to advise inquirers after the religious life ; 
and perhaps some of us will think it sufficient to say, 
" Read good books," " Converse with pious friends," 
" Attend church." A man might die doing all these 
things, and die unsaved. What is salvation? De- 
liverance from the love of sin and the guilt of sin. 
Shall we say to the soul which as yet is disloyal to 
conscience, " Listen to the best public, and read the 
best printed, discussions of religious truth " ? A 
man might die doing that, and die unsaved. " At- 

137 



138 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

tend devotional meetings ; throw yourself into those 
assemblies where the union of many minds and 
hearts in one purpose, and that the loftiest, makes 
religion contagious " ? A man might die doing that, 
and not die free from the love of sin or from the 
guilt of sin. 

Of course, you will not understand me to under- 
value these tried and crowned instrumentalities for 
the religious awakening and culture of the soul. 
They are efficient: they are not sufficient. Never- 
theless, many who call themselves intelligent Chris- 
tians give no other than this dawdling, unscientific, 
completely unbiblical, and often incalculably mis- 
chievous advice to the religiously irresolute. 

Will the use of stereotyped religious phrases make 
our advice sufficient, if it is followed, to save a soul 
from both the love of sin and the guilt of sin? 
" Look to Jesus," you say. Surely a man might do 
that, in the sense in which many understand the 
phrase, and not be free from the love of sin or the 
guilt of sin. I do not say that any soul can do that 
intelligently, and not be saved. What misunder- 
standing is there of that phrase, and of the hallowed 
expression, " Come to Jesus " ! Some say, " Believe 
that Jesus is Christ, and you shall be saved. Do you 
believe that Jesus is God ? Then you are saved." 
I have heard that statement made in not a few in- 
quiry-rooms ; but a more infamous disloyalty to both 
scriptural and scientific truth cannot be imagined 
than the assertion that salvation comes from merely 
believing that Jesus is the Son of God. I know 



FINAL PERMANENCE OF MORAL CHARACTER. 139 

where I am speaking, and what I am saying, I hope. 
It is not unfamiliar business to me to study the holy 
of holies of a religious awakening ; for it was my 
fortune for some years to act as evangelist, in part ; 
and I have often found in that innermost shrine the 
most ghastly misconceptions doing immortal mischief. 
The religiously irresolute must be allowed to rest in 
nothing which does not involve their immediate and 
total self-surrender to God as both Saviour and 
Lord. 

Your Romish priest comes to the dying soldier on 
the battle-field, and there are but a few minutes for 
religious conversation. Very possibly he holds the 
crucifix before the eyes in which the film of death 
is already visible, and says, " Believe that Jesus is 
Christ, and you will be saved." To witness such a 
scene many times is enough to make a wise man in- 
sane. To misdirect authoritatively a parting spirit 
not yet loyal to conscience is to slay, perhaps, not 
only life, but immortality. How does the poor, 
doubting, weak, trembling soul understand that lan- 
guage ? Perhaps he has no other meaning conveyed 
to him than that, if he believes that God was in some 
way in Christ, he will be saved. Beyond all contro- 
versy, he might believe that, and not be free from 
the love of sin or the guilt of sin. We read on 
high authority that the black angels believe as much 
as that, and tremble. We must beware of falling 
into the Romish error of confounding assent with 
consent, or belief with faith. In the name of sci- 
ence, no less than in that of the Bible, we must 



140 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

beware of advising the unconverted to do any thing 
that does not include immediate, total, affectionate, 
irreversible self-surrender to God as both Saviour 
and Lord. [Applause.] 

Stereotyped phrases, although struck out originally 
at white-heat, may, in religious as well as in poetic 
phraseology, at last, after centuries of use, become 
cold cinders. Cant is the use of cooled cinders in 
place of glowing coals. There is as much literary as 
religious cant in the world. Eloquent as many of 
our oldest human religious phrases may be, touchingly 
historic as they are to an educated mind, and measure- 
lessly deep as some of them are to a student, their 
stereotyped character of course often diminishes 
greatly their clearness to the head, and vastly their 
impressiveness to the heart, of the inattentive and 
half-educated. Once a century, the world needs a 
new set of phrases for all its greatest truths. Chan- 
ging phrases for truths that never change keeps the 
latter always new. 

There are two styles of language, — the biblical 
and the scientific. As a precaution against fateful 
misunderstanding, why should we not employ both, 
since our personal interpretation of biblical phrases is 
often not that which the mind of the inquirer makes ? 
There is a great difference between believing and 
believing in. I believe Congress when it makes a 
public statement ; but I do not believe in all the acts 
of Congress, nor in all its members. I believe Ben- 
edict Arnold when he writes an autobiographical 
sketch ; but I do not believe in Benedict Arnold. I 



FINAL PERMANENCE OF MORAL CHARACTER. 141 

believe Washington and Lincoln when they write let- 
ters ; and I also believe in Washington and Lincoln. 
On the one hand we have believing, and on the other 
believing in or on ; and the Greek tongue makes even 
a clearer distinction between the two than the Eng- 
lish. But when the great words are cited, " Believe 
on the Lord Jesus Christ," how often, although this 
language is biblical, does it fail to convey the mean- 
ing it always contains, of the necessity of affectionate 
self-commitment of the soul to God, or of rejoicing 
personal loyalty to him as both Saviour and Lord ? 
Coleridge said, " I believe Plato and Aristotle : I 
believe in Jesus Christ" {Table Conversations). To 
believe in a person implies admiration of that per- 
son's character, and naturally results in confidence, 
gladness, pride, and alacrity in following his lead. 

If in this sense you believe in God in Christ, you 
accept him lo} T ally as Prophet, Priest, and King, or 
as both Saviour and Lord, and you are learning to 
love what he loves, and to hate what he hates ; and 
the nature of things will no longer be against you. 
But until you not only believe, but believe on and 
believe in, and thus affectionately choose, God as 
both Saviour and Lord, of course, there is no safety 
for you, for there cannot be any similarity of feeling 
between you and God. When you come to believe 
in him, that means that you love him, and that you 
are ready to obey him, not slavishly, but with 
delight. I believe in Lincoln ; I believe in Wash- 
ington : and therefore I am ready to have them for 
my guides, I am proud and glad to follow whither- 



142 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

soever they lead. If we are to be Christians in a 
similar sense, we are to believe in God not only as 
Lord, but also as Saviour. 

Shall we look on God chiefly as Saviour, or chiefly 
as Lord ? Which of these infinities shall we gaze on 
first, if by the gaze the soul is to be transformed into 
the Divine image ? 

Two things are meant by the one word " guilt : " 
first, demerit or blameworthiness; secondly, obliga- 
tion to suffer the punishment due to our offences. 
Revelation teaches that Christ our Lord had laid on 
him our guilt in the latter sense, but not in the for- 
mer. He assumed the obligation to satisfy the de- 
mands of justice on our part ; he did not assume the 
demerit or blameworthiness of our transgressions 
(Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. ii. p. 189). In the 
nature of things, demerit cannot be transferred from 
person to person. Ill-desert rests on the transgressor 
forever. A criminal who has served out his legal 
term in prison is freed from all further obligation to 
suffer the punishment of the law ; but he is not free 
from the demerit of having been a criminal. He is 
delivered from guilt in the second sense, but not 
from guilt in the first sense of the word. A man 
who has been a deserter comes back to his king, 
and should receive a thousand stripes. His king 
takes a hundred in his place, and that chastisement 
is substituted for the deserter's punishment. The 
deserter's demerit remains ; in the nature of things, 
his king could not assume that. Forever and for- 
ever it will be true that the man has behind him the 



FINAL PERMAISTENCE OF MORAL CHARACTER. 148 

record of a deserter. Even Omnipotence cannot 
make what once has been not to have been. But, 
forever and forever the deserter's debt to the law 
is paid, and its payment cannot be demanded of the 
deserter. If, now, that deserter wishes motives to loy- 
alty, what ought he to keep vividly before his thoughts ? 
his Lord's power, or his Lord's unspeakable con- 
descension? his Lord as his King, or his Lord as 
his Redeemer ? All hearts that understand it, this 
question melts in this age as it has in every past 
age, and will in every future age. Let the deserter 
remember his. own irremovable demerit ; let him fill 
his soul with thoughts of his King as his Redeemer. 

What am I saying ? Look on what God has done : 
look on what God is. In the old and majestic lan- 
guage, of a depth unfathomable : " Look on the 
Cross," and you ivill lose the desire to sin. You will 
find departing from every pulse of your soul all hate 
of what God loves, and all love of what God hates. 
Look first on God as Saviour, and you shall learn to 
choose him affectionately as Lord. Now, now, now, 
behold and trust him as your Redeemer, and take him 
gladly as King. This is a direction which a man 
cannot die following, and die without deliverance 
from the love of sin and the fear of its penalties. 
So long as you fail to choose God affectionately as 
both Saviour and Lord, so long your love of sin, and 
fear of its penalties, will continue ; and so long in the 
nature of things — a terrible authority ! — you can- 
not enter into peace. When you have accepted God 
gladly as both Saviour and Lord, you, as a returned 



144 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

deserter, can have peace, not by, but not without, 
facing the foe. [Applause.] 

THE LECTURE. 

When Charles IX. of France was importuned to 
kill Coligny, he for a long time refused to do so pub- 
licly or secretly ; but at last he gave way, and con- 
sented in these memorable words : " Assassinate 
Admiral Coligny, but leave not a Huguenot alive in 
France to reproach me." So came the Massacre of 
St. Bartholomew. When the soul resolves to assassi- 
nate some holy motive ; when the spirit determines 
to kill, in the inner realm, Admiral Coligny, it, too, 
delays for a while ; and, when it gives way usually 
says, "Assassinate this accuser of mine, but leave 
not an accusing accomplice of his in all my kingdom 
alive to reproach me." So comes the massacre of the 
desire to be holy. 

Emerson quotes the Welsh Triad as saying, " God 
himself cannot procure good for the wicked." Julius 
Miiller, Dorner, Rothe, Schleiermacher, no less than 
Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates, assert, that, in the 
nature of things, there can be no blessedness without 
holiness. Confucius said, "Heaven means princi- 
ple." But what if a soul permanently loses princi- 
ple? Si visfugere a Deo fug e ad Deum, is the Latin 
proverb. If you wish to flee from God, flee to him. 
The soul cannot escape from God; and can two 
walk together unless they are agreed ? Surely there 
are a few certainties in religion, or several points 
clear to exact ethical science in relation to the natu- 
ral conditions of the peace of the soul. 



FINAL PERMANENCE OF MORAL CHARACTER. 145 

It is plainly possible that a man may fall into free 
permanent dissimilarity of feeling with God, or fail 
to attain a predominant desire to be holy. 

If he does, it remains scientifically certain that even 
Omnipotence and Omniscience cannot force upon 
such a character blessedness. There can be no bless- 
edness without holiness ; and there can be no holiness 
without a supreme love of what God loves, and a 
supreme hate of what God hates. It is possible that 
a man may so disarrange his nature as not to attain a 
permanent and predominant desire to be holy. 

Theodore Parker, as his biographers admit, must 
be called a great reader rather than a great scholar. 
But De Wette, his German master, although most 
of his works have ceased to be authorities in biblical 
research, ought to have prevented Theodore Parker 
from asserting that the Founder of Christianity did 
not teach that there may be a failure in a free agent 
to attain a permanent and predominant desire to be 
holy. Theodore Parker himself ought to have pre- 
vented himself from that assertion. In his earlier 
career he held that our Lord did teach a possibility 
of the failure of some forever and forever to attain 
a supreme love of what God loves, and a supreme 
hate of what God hates. He thought that the New 
Testament, properly interpreted, does contain in it a 
statement that it is possible for a man to fail perma- 
nently to attain the predominant desire to be holy ; 
and this was one of Parker's reasons for rejecting 
the authority of the New Testament. But toward 
the end of his career he tried to persuade Frances 



146 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

Power Cobbe that the Founder of Christianity did 
not teach that any will be lost. Parker's writings 
are self-contradictory on this supreme topic, most of 
the real difficulties of which he skipped. 

It is the wisdom of all science, however, never to 
skip difficulties. I know how widely intellectual un- 
rest on the topic I am now introducing fills minds 
that never have been much troubled by Theodore 
Parker. I know that many conscientious and learned 
persons have asked themselves the question the dis- 
ciples once asked our Lord: "Are there few that 
be saved ?." He answered that inquiry very distinct- 
ly, " Yes, there are few." Does science answer in 
the same way ? 

It would not follow, my friends, even if you were 
to take our Lord's answer as supreme authority, as I 
do, that this universe is a failure. All ages to come 
are to be kept in view ; all other worlds. Our Lord's 
words referred to our present evil generation ; and, 
if you ask the central question in the best modern 
form, you must answer it in his way. How many, in 
the present state of our earth, love predominantly 
what God loves, and hate predominantly what God 
hates ? How many have acquired predominant simi- 
larity of feeling with God? Only those who have 
can be at peace in his presence, either here or here- 
after. That is as certain as any deduction from our 
intuitions concerning the nature of things. As sure 
as that a thing cannot be and not be at the same 
time, in the same sense, so sure is it that a man cannot 
be at peace with God when he loves what he hates, 



FINAL PERMANENCE OF MORAL CHARACTER. 147 

and hates what he loves. There must be harmony 
or dissonance between them; and dissonance is its 
own punishment. Dissimilarity of feeling with God 
carries with it immense wages, in the nature of things. 
In the name of science ask, Are there few that have 
acquired a predominant love of what God loves, and 
a predominant hate of what God hates ? We must 
answer, in the name of science, that broad is the way 
and wide is the gate, which, in our evil generation, 
leads to dissimilarity of feeling with God ; and many 
there be who go in thereat: but strait is the way 
and narrow is the gate which leads to similarity of 
feeling with God ; and few are they in our time that 
find it. But there are other worlds ; there are other 
ages. " Save yourselves from this untoward genera- 
tion." Who knows, that, in the final summing-up, the 
number of the lost may be greater than that of the 
saved ? or, as Lyman Beecher used to say in this city, 
" greater than the number of our criminals in penal 
institutions is in contrast with the whole of the pop- 
ulation." But I talk of the galaxies : I talk of the 
infinities and of the eternities, and not merely of 
this world in which you and I are to work out our 
deliverance from the love of sin and the guilt of sin, 
and have reason to do so with fear and trembling. 

I ask no man here to-day, or any day, to take my 
opinions. You are requested to notice whether dis- 
cussion is clear, not whether it is orthodox. Let us 
put aside entirely all ecclesiastical and denomina- 
tional tests. This Lectureship has for its purpose 
simply the discussion of the clear, the true, the new, 



148 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

and the strategic, in the relations between science 
and religion. 

What are some of the more important natural laws 
which enable us to estimate scientifically the possible 
extent of the natural penalties of sin ? 

1. Under irreversible natural law sin produces 
judicial blindness. 

Kill Admiral Colign}^ drive out the Huguenots, 
permit the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, and you 
have made a new France. Carlyle says that it pleased 
France to slit her own veins and let out the best 
blood she had, and that she did this on the night of 
the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; and that, after 
that, she was historically another creature. Having 
killed Coligny, you cannot look his friends in the 
face ; you kill them, and your kingdom is a new one. 
When a man sins against light, there comes upon him 
an unwillingness to look into the accusing illumina- 
tion; and the consequence is, that he turns away 
from it. But that effect itself becomes a cause. Keep 
your eyes upon your Shakspeare, upon your Greek 
poets, or upon whatever is a good mirror of human 
nature, and tell me whether these six propositions 
are not all scientifically demonstrable : — 

(1.) Truth possessed, but not obeyed, becomes 
unwelcome: 

(2.) It is therefore shut out of the voluntary acti- 
vities of memory and reflection, as it gives pain. 

(3.) The passions it should check grow, therefore, 
stronger. 

(4.) The moral emotions it should feed grow 
weaker. 



FINAL PERMANENCE OF MORAL CHARACTER. 149 

(5.) An ill-balanced state of the soul thus arises, 
and tends to become habitual. 

(6.) That ill-balanced state renders the soul blind 
to the truths most needed to rectify its condition. 

" On the temperate man," says Aristotle (Rhetoric, 
Bohn's edition, p. 70), " are attendant, perhaps forth- 
with, by motion of his temperance, good opinions 
and appetites as to pleasures ; but, on the intemper- 
ate, the opposite." 

A man sins against light boldly. To the divine " I 
ought," he answers " I will not ; " to the divine " Thou 
shalt " or " Thou oughtest," he replies " I will not." 
The consequence instantly is, that he ceases to be at 
peace with himself; and light, instead of becoming a 
blessing, is to him an accusation. The slant javelin 
of truth, that was intended to penetrate him with 
rapture, fills him now with torture. If we give our- 
selves to an exact study of the soul's pains and pleas- 
ures, we shall find in man no greater bliss than con- 
science can afford, and no greater pain than it can 
inflict. In this stage of existence, the highest bliss 
comes from similarity of feeling with God, and the 
highest pain from dissimilarity of feeling with him. 
The greatest pains and pleasures, therefore, are set 
over against our greatest duties ; and so God's desire 
that we should agree with him is shown by our 
living under the piercing points of all these penalties 
and blisses. But, light having become an accuser, 
man turns away from it. Then the virtues which 
that light ought to quicken are allowed to languish. 
The vices which that light ought to repress grow 



150 TKANSCENDENTALISM. 

more vigorous. Repeated acts of sin result in a con- 
tinued state of dissimilarity of feeling with God. 
That state is an effect; but it becomes a cause. 
According to New-England theology, sin exists only 
in acts of choice; but the newest school of that 
theology need have no war with the oldest, for the 
former recognizes as fully as the latter can, that the 
state of dissimilarity of feeling with God is the source 
of the evil acts of choice. That state of the disposi- 
tions is the copious fountain of sin, and as such is 
properly called depravity. This state, continuing, 
becomes a habit; then that habit, continuing long, 
becomes chronic ; and so the result is an ill-balanced 
growth of the character. 

When I hung my hammock up last summer on the 
shores of Lake George, I noticed that the trees 
nearest the light, at the edge of the forest, had larger 
branches than those in the interior of the wood ; and 
the same tree would throw out a long branch toward 
the light, and a short one toward obscurity in the 
interior of the forest. Just so a man grows toward 
the light to which he turns. According to the 
direction in which he turns with his supreme affection, 
he grows ; and as he grows he balances ; and under 
the irreversible natural law of moral gravitation, — 
as fixed, as scientific a certainty in the universe as 
the law of physical gravitation, — as he balances, so 
he falls ; and, according to science, after a tree has 
fallen under that law, the prostrate trunk continues 
to be under the law ; and, therefore, as it falls so it 
lies. 



FINAL PERMANENCE OF MORAL CHARACTER. 151 

Under moral gravitation no less surely than under 
physical, every free object that falls out of the sky 
strikes on its heavier side. They showed me at 
Amherst, the other day, a meteorite that dropped out 
of the azure ; and it struck on which side ? Of 
course, on its heavier. As the stream runs, so it 
wears its channel ; as it wears its channel, so it runs. 
All the mythologies of the globe recognize this 
fearful law of judicial blindness. 

Go yonder into Greenland with the learned travel- 
ler Ranke, and you will find a story among the men 
of the lonely North, to the effect, that if a sorcerer 
will make a stirrup out of a strip of seal-skin, and 
wind it around his limbs, three times about his heart, 
and thrice about his neck, and seven times about his 
forehead, and then knot it before his eyes, that sor- 
cerer, when the lamps are put out at night, may rise 
into space, and fly whithersoever his leading passion 
dictates. So we put ourselves into the stirrup of 
predominant love of what God hates, and predomi- 
nant hate of what God loves, and we coil the strands 
about our souls. They are thrice wound about our 
heart, three times around the neck, seven times 
around our foreheads, and knotted before cur eyes. 
If the poor savages yonder, where the stars look 
down four months of the year without interruption, 
are right in their sublime theory as to the solemnities 
of the universe, we, too, when the lamps are out, shall 
rise into the Unseen Holy, and fly whithersoever 
our leading passion dictates. 

Greenland says that hunters once went out, and 



152 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

found a revolving mountain, and that, attempting to 
cross the chasm between it and the firm land, some 
of these men were crushed as the mountain revolved. 
But they finally noticed that the gnarled, wheeling 
mass had a red side and a white side. They waited 
till the white side came opposite them, and then, 
ascending the mountain, found that a king lived on 
its summit, made themselves loyal to him, surren- 
dered themselves to him affectionately and irreversi- 
bly, and afterwards found themselves able to go and 
come safely. But the mountain had a red side ; and 
it turned and turned, and there was no safety on it, 
except on the white side and in loyalty to the king 
at the summit in the clouds. That mythology of the 
North, lately read for us by scholars, has in it eternal 
verity, and a kind of solemnity like that of the long 
shining of the Arctic stars, and the tumbling ice- 
bergs, and the peaceable gurgle of the slow-heaving 
Polar Ocean, far-gleaming under the Boreal Lights 
or the midnight Arctic sun. Stunted, you think, 
the men of that zone ? Why, on the banks of the 
Charles yonder, your Longfellow, taking up a Ger- 
man poet, finds the same idea in far less sublime and 
subtle imagery, and translates it for its majesty and 
truth : 

" The mills of God grind slowly; 
But they grind exceeding small." 

To me there is in Macbeth nothing so terrible as 
Lady Macbeth's invocation of the spirits which pro- 
duce moral callousness in the soul. There is no 



FINAL PERMANENCE OF MOEAL CHARACTER. 153 

passage in that sublime treatise on conscience which 
we call Macbeth, so sublime to me as this, on the 
law of judicial blindness : 

" The raven himself is hoarse 
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan 
Under my battlements. Come, yon spirits. 

Unsex me here, 

And fill me, from the crown to the toe, topful 
Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood, 
Stop up the access and passage to remorse. 

Come, thick night, 
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, 
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, 
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, 
To cry, 'Hold, hold! '" 

Macbeth, act i. sc. 5. 

That invocation is likely to be uttered by every 
soul which has said " I will not" to the divine "I 
ought." It is as sure to be answered as natural law 
is to be irreversible. Macbeth himself, in a similar 

mood, says : 

" Come, seeling night, 
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day ; 
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond 
Which keeps me pale ! Light thickens ; and the crow 
Makes wing to the rooky wood." 

Macbeth, act iii. sc. 2. 

Have you ever offered in the rooky wood of sor- 
cerous temptation a prayer for blindness ? In the 
nature of things every sin against light draws blood on 
the spiritual retina. 

You say that after death you are to have more illu- 



154 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

urination, and that therefore yon will reform beyond 
the grave. How do you know that you will see 
greater illumination, even if you are in the presence 
of it ? How do you know that you will love it, even 
if you do see it ? There can be no blessedness with- 
out holiness ; there can be no holiness without a free, 
affectionate acknowledgment of God as King, or a 
supreme love of what he loves, and hate of what he 
hates. Are you likely to obtain these soon under 
the law of judicial blindness ? You will have what 
you like; but do you like the light? You have 
more and more illumination now as the years pass. 
Do you see it ? Do you love it ? There are two 
questions about this greater light beyond the grave : 
first, Will you see it? second, Will you like it? 
Unless you have authority in the name of science for 
answering both these questions in the affirmative, 
you have no right in the name of science to rely on 
a mere possibility, on a guess, and take your leap 
into the Unseen, depending on a riddle. I for one 
will not do this for myself; and I will not teach 
others to do so. [Applause.] 

Shakspeare has not left us in doubt at all on this 
theme ; for in another place he says, — 

" But when we in our viciousness grow hard, 
The wise gods seal our eyes ; 

In our own slime drop our clear judgments, make us 
Adore our errors ; laugh at us while we strut 
To our confusion." 

Antony and Cleopatra, act hi. sc. 13. 






FINAL PERMANENCE OF MORAL CHARACTER. 155 

Carlyle. quotes out of the Koran a story of the 
dwellers by the Dead Sea, to whom Moses was sent. 
They sniffed and sneered at Moses ; saw no comeli- 
ness in Moses ; and so he withdrew : but Nature and 
her rigorous veracities did not withdraw. When 
next we find the dwellers by the Dead Sea, they, 
according to the Koran, are all changed into apes. 
"By not using their souls they lost them. And 
now," continues Carlyle, " their only employment is 
to sit there and look out into the smokiest, dreariest, 
most undecipherable sort of universe : only once in 
seven days they do remember that they once had 
souls. Hast thou never, O traveller ! fallen in with 
parties of this tribe ? Methinks they have grown 
somewhat numerous in our day." [Applause.] 

The old Greek proverb was, that the avenging 
deities are shod with wool ; but the wool grows on 
the eyelids that refuse the light. " Whom the gods 
would destroy they first make mad ; " but the in- 
sanity arises from judicial blindness. 

Jeremy Taylor says that whoever sins against light 
kisses the lips of a blazing cannon. 

I never saw a dare-devil face that had not in it 
something of both the sneak and the fool. The 
sorcery of sin is, that it changes a man into a sneak 
and a fool ; but the fool does not know that he is a 
sneak, and the sneak does not know that he is a fool. 

If I were a sculptor, I should represent sin with 
two faces, like those of Janus, looking in opposite 
directions : one should be idiotic, the other Machia- 
vellian. But the one face would not see the other. 



156 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

The idiot would not know he is Machiavellian ; 
the Machiavelli would not know that he is idiotic. 
The sneak would not know that he is a fool, nor the 
fool that he is a sneak. 

2. Under irreversible natural law, there is a self- 
propagating power in sin. 

Of course, this self-propagating power depends 
upon the law of judicial blindness very largely, but 
by no means exclusively. So are we made, that every 
effect in the growth of our characters becomes a 
cause, and every good effect no less than every bad 
one. 

The laws of the self-propagating power of habit 
bless the righteous as much as they curse the wicked. 
The laws by which we attain supreme bliss are the 
laws by which we descend to supreme woe. In the 
ladder up and the ladder down in the universe, 
the rungs are in the same side-pieces. The self-pro- 
pagating power of sin and the self-propagating power 
of holiness are one law. The law of judicial blind- 
ness is one with that by which the pure in heart see 
God ; and they who walk toward the east find the 
morning brighter and brighter to the perfect day. 

Of course, I shall offend many, if I assert that there 
may be penalty that has no remedial tendency. But, 
gentlemen, I ask you to be clear, and to remember 
that an unwelcome truth is really not destroyed by 
shutting the eyes to it. There are three kinds of 
natural laws, — the physical, the organic, and the 
moral. I affirm that "Never too late to mend" is not a 
doctrine of science in the domain of the physical laws, 
nor is it in that of the organic. 



FINAL PERMANENCE OF MORAL CHARACTER. 157 

Under the physical laws of gravitation a ship may 
careen to the right or left, and only a remedial effect 
be produced. The danger may teach the crew sea- 
manship; it makes men bold and wise. Thus the 
penalty of violating, up to a certain point, the physi- 
cal law, is remedial in its tendency. But let the ship 
careen beyond a certain line, and it capsizes. If it be 
of iron, it remains at the bottom of the sea ; and hun- 
dreds and hundreds of years of suffering of that pen- 
alty has no tendency to bring it back. Under the 
physical natural laws, plainly there is such a thing as 
its being too late to mend. In their immeasurable 
domain there is a distinction between penalty that 
has a remedial tendency, and penalty that has no 
remedial tendency at all. 

So, under the organic law, your tropical tree, 
gashed at a certain point, may throw forth its gums, 
and even have greater strength than before ; but 
gashed beyond the centre, cut through, the organic 
law is so far violated, that the tree falls ; and after 
a thousand years you do not expect to see the tree 
escape from the dominion of the law which is enfor- 
cing upon it penalty, do you ? There is no tendency 
in that penalty toward remedial effect ; none at all ; 
and you know it. Therefore, under the organic laws, 
there is such a thing as its being too late tomend. 

Now, gentlemen, keep your eyes fastened upon the 
great principle of analogy, which Newton and Butler 
call the supreme rule in science, and ask yourselves 
whether, if you were to find some strange animal in 
a geological stratum, and if you were to know, by 



158 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

having one of its hands free, that it had three fingers, 
and if you were to find two fingers on the other hand 
free from the rock, and both shutting toward the 
palm, you would not infer that the third finger, if 
you could loosen it from the rock, Would also be 
found closing toward the palm ? Just so, I ask, 
whether, if we find, that, under two sets of natural 
laws which are all included under three classes, there 
is incontrovertibly such a thing as penalty without 
remedial effect, may there not be the same under the 
third set? Two fingers shut towards the palm. I 
cannot quite trace the whole range of the moral law ; 
but I know by analogy, that, if two fingers shut to- 
wards the palm, the third probably does. If there is 
such a thing as its being forever too late to mend under 
the organic and the physical natural law, probably, and 
more than probably, there is such a thing under the 
moral natural law. [Applause.] 

Yes; but you say the will is free, and there- 
fore that it cannot be supposed that a man will fall 
into final dissimilarity of feeling with God, or can 
so lose the desire to be holy, that he will not choose 
the right when greater light comes. You affirm that 
the self-propagating power of sin may place necessity 
upon the disordered nature. You say that the denial 
that all moral penalty is remedial requires us to 
deny that the will of lost souls continues free. I beg 
your pardon again, and that in the name of science. 
Gentlemen, there may be certainty where there is no 
necessity. 

Is John Milton putting together a self-contradiction 



FINAL PEEMANENCE OF MORAL CHARACTER. 159 

when he pictures Satan as making evil his good, and 
as yet retaining a free will? Is he uttering self- 
contradiction when he shows us a fiendish character 
which retains yet some elements of its original bright- 
ness ? Has Milton's Satan lost free will ? I affirm 
that you know that John Milton's Satan is not an 
impossible character. You say you do not care 
what Milton says ; but I am not asking you to accept 
his theology. Let me not be misunderstood in my 
citations of the poets as witnesses to what man is. 
Paradise Lost is a great classic ; and no poem attains 
that rank if it is full of manifest absurdities. Now, 
Milton's Satan is a character in which the disarrange- 
ment of the soul is supposed to have become perma- 
nent ; he has fallen into final permanence of evil 
character ; and yet he is represented as absolutely 
free, and not very near annihilation. I appeal to 
classical literature to show that a permanent evil 
character with a free will is not a psychological self- 
contradiction. You admit this readily, age after age, 
in your great classics ; but the instant I here, stand- 
ing face to face with natural religion, assert that 
there may be a final permanence of free character, 
bad as well as good, and good as well as bad, you 
stand aghast at your own proceeding. Gentlemen, 
you and I must have no cross-purposes with the 
nature of things. If Milton's description is not a 
psychological self-contradiction, there may be a per- 
son of permanently bad character, absolutely free, 
and therefore responsible. [Applause.] 

Origen used to teach that the prince of fiends 



160 TEANSCENDENTALISM. 

might return to a glad allegiance to God ; and so did 
Robert Burns, whom Emerson commends for using 
these words, originally written to attack the proposi- 
tion I am now defending, but, after all, containing 
most subtle confirmation of it : 

" Auld Mckie Ben, 
An' wad ye tak a thought and men', 
Ye aiblins might — I dinna ken — 
Still hae a stake." 

No, gentlemen ; the self-propagating power of sin 
may produce a state of soul in which evil is chosen 
as good, and in which it is forever too late to mend, 
and yet not destroy free will. 

3. Under irreversible natural law character tends to 
a final permanence, good or bad. In the nature of the 
case, a final permanence is attained but once. 

If asked whether final permanence of character is 
a natural law, what should you say, if we were to 
speak without reference to conclusions in religious 
science ? How have men in all ages expressed them- 
selves in literature and philosophy on this theme? 
Is it not perfectly certain that all the great writers 
of the world justify the proposition that character 
tends to a final permanence, good or bad ? 

Gentlemen, this universe up to the edge of the 
tomb is not a joke. There are in this life serious dif- 
ferences between the right hand and the left. Never- 
theless, in our present career, a man has but one 
chance. Even if you come weighted into the world, 
as Sindbad was with the Old Man of the Sea, you 



FINAL PERMANENCE OF MORAL CHARACTER. 161 

have but one chance. Time does not fly in a 
circle, but forth, and right on. The wandering, 
squandering, desiccated moral leper is gifted with no 
second set of early years. There is no fountain in 
Florida that gives perpetual youth ; and the universe 
might be searched, probably, in vain for such a 
spring. Waste your youth ; in it you shall have but 
one chance. Waste your middle life ; in it you shall 
have but one chance. Waste your old age ; in it you 
shall have but one chance. It is an irreversible nat- 
ural law that character attains final permanence, and 
in the nature of things final permanence can come but 
once. This world is fearfully and wonderfully made, 
and so are we, and we shall escape neither ourselves 
nor these stupendous laws. It is not to me a pleasant 
thing to exhibit these truths from the side of terror ; 
but, on the other side, these are the truths of bliss ; 
for, by this very law through which all character tends 
to become unchanging, a soul that attains a final per- 
manence of good character runs but one risk, and 
is delivered once for all from its torture and un- 
rest. [Applause.] It has passed the bourn from 
behind which no man is caught out of the fold. He 
who is the force behind all natural law is the keeper 
of his sheep, and no one is able to pluck them out of 
his hand. Himself without variableness or shadow 
of turning, he maintains the irreversibleness of all 
natural forces, one of which is the insufferably majes- 
tic law by which character tends to assume final per- 
manence, good, as well as bad. 

4. Under irreversible natural law there may be in 



162 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

the soul a permanent failure to attain a predominant 
and enduring desire to be holy. 

With incisive scientific clearness, Julius Miiller 
says, " Such is the constitution of things that unwill- 
ingness to goodness may ripen into eternal voluntary 
opposition to it " (Doctrine of Sin, vol. ii.). 

The inveteracy of sin ! have you ever heard of 
that ? Out of its acknowledged inveteracy will not 
easily arise its evanescence. Out of its prolongation 
comes its inveteracy, and out of its inveteracy may 
come it's permanence. 

Here and now I do not touch the topic of the 
annihilation of those who fall into permanent dissimi- 
larity of feeling with God ; for I do not see that this 
cause produces any tendency to annihilation in this 
world, when a man becomes incorrigibly bad. Vil- 
lains do not commonly lack force. Your Nero, with 
his murders and leprosies, has put his nature out of 
order ; but look at his evil face in marble on the 
Capitoline Hill, and you start as if gazing into a 
demon's eyes. He is as little weak as a volcano. 
What do men mean when they talk of vice annihilat- 
ing souls ? It disarranges them ; but disarrange- 
ment is not annihilation. Tacitus says that Nero 
heard the sound of a trumpet and groans from the 
grave of his mother Agrippina whom he had mur- 
dered. His disarrangement was not derangement. 
Acting fitfully, all the wheels of the faculties con- 
tinued to exist in Nero ; and they are none of them 
without movement. They grind on each other, no 
doubt ; but I do not find that spiritual wheels can be 






FINAL PERMANENCE OF MORAL CHARACTER. 163 

pulverized. Do you know how they can be ? This 
idea that evil is to annihilate us ought to have some 
distinctly scientific support in the experience of this 
life. 

5. Under irreversible natural law there may exist 
in the universe eternal sin. 

It is not my duty here to expound the Scriptures ; 
but you will allow me to say, gentlemen, that " eternal 
sin" is a scriptural phrase. As all these scholars 
know, we must read in the twenty-ninth verse of the 
third chapter of Mark, hamartematos, and not Jcriseos. 
He who sinneth against the Holy Ghost is in danger 
of " eternal sin" Theodore Parker used to say that 
the profoundest expressions in the New Testament 
are those which are most likely to have been cor- 
rectly reported. What phrase on this theme is pro- 
founder than "eternal sin"? Dean Alford well 
says, that " it is to the critical treatment of the sacred 
text, that we owe the restoration of such important 
and deep-reaching expressions as this." Lange calls 
it " a strong and pregnant expression." 

It is not the best way in which to teach the truth 
of future punishment, to say that a man is punished 
forever and forever for the sins of that hand's- 
breadth of duration we call time. If the soul does not 
repent of these with contrition, and not merely with 
attrition, the nature of things forbids its peace. But 
the Biblical and the natural truth is, that prolonged 
dissimilarity of feeling with God may end in eternal 
sin. If there is eternal sin, there will be eternal pun- 
ishment. Final permanence of character under the 



164 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

laws of judicial blindness and the self-propagating 
power of sin is the truth emphasized by both God's 
word and his works. 

6. Under irreversible natural law there can be no 
blessedness without holiness. 

Here I leave you face to face with the nature of 
things, the authority which dazzled Socrates. God's 
Omnipotence cannot force blessedness on a soul that 
has lost the predominant desire to be holy. Omni- 
science cannot make happy a man who loves what 
God hates, and hates what God loves. If you fall 
into predominant dissimilarity of feeling with God, 
it is out of his power to give you blessedness. Un- 
doubtedly we are, of all men, most miserable, unless, 
with our deliverance from the guilt of sin, there comes 
to us also deliverance from the love of it. Without 
holiness there can be no blessedness ; but there can 
be no holiness without a predominant love of what 
God loves, and hate of what God hates. We grow 
wrong; Ave allow ourselves to crystallize in habits 
that imply a loss of the desire to be holy; and at last, 
having made up our minds not to love predomi- 
nantly what God loves, and hate what he hates, we 
are amazed that we have not blessedness. But the 
universe is not amazed. The nature of things is but 
another name for the Divine Nature. God would 
not be God if there could be blessedness without 
holiness. [Applause.] 



vn. 

CAN A PERFECT BEING PERMIT EVIL? 

THE SIXTY-FIFTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC- 
TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE FEB. 12. 






" Prope est a te Deus, tecum est, intus est! ita dico, Lucili: sacra 
inter nos spiritus sedet, malorum bonorumque nostrorum observator 
et custos: hie, prout a nobis tractatus est, ita nos ipse tractat." — 
Seneca. 



"Dieu nous veult apprendre que les bons out autre chose a 
esperer, et les inauvais autre chose a craindre, que les fortunes ou 
infortunes de ce monde." — Montaigne. 



vn. 

CAN A PERFECT BEING PERMIT EVIL? 

PKELTJDE ON" CURRENT EVENTS. 

Before landing on the surly Massachusetts shore, 
our fathers, in the cabin of the Mayflower, drew 
up a civil compact. It opens with a sentence which 
Daniel Webster used to say is really the first clause 
in the Constitution of the United States : " In the 
name of God, Amen." There are now in this yet 
young nation church-members enough, including the 
Romish, to constitute one in six of the entire popu- 
lation. It would appear that this first clause of the 
Constitution would be goad for something, if church- 
members were good for any thing. In 1800 we had 
only one in fifteen inside the church. 

Professor Tholuck, with the emphasis of tears in 
his deep, spiritual eyes, once said to me at Halle, in 
his garden on the banks of the Saale, that he re- 
gretted nothing so much in the arrangements of the 
German state churches as that the distinction between 
the converted and the unconverted, which Whitefield 
and Jonathan Edwards drew so deeply upon the 
mind of New England, is almost unknown, not to 

167 



168 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

the theories, but to the church practices, of Germany. 
" We are all mixed pell-mell together," said he. 
" After confirmation, we are all, in one sense, mem- 
bers of the church. I have always regarded the dis- 
tinction you preserve in New England between a 
man who has made a solemn public profession of his 
purpose to lead a religious life, and the one who has 
not, as the most important portion of the unwritten 
constitution of your nation." Except Scotland, 
there is no land on the globe that makes as much 
of this distinction as New England does. So has 
the spirit of the unwritten law permeated society 
at large here and in Scotland, that disgusts of the 
world with the church are sure to stifle the useful- 
ness of the latter, if this law is administered laxly. 

Whitefield often affirmed that he would rather 
have a church with ten men in it right with God 
than one with five hundred at whom the world laughs 
in its sleeves. Not long ago, I heard of a church- 
member who had failed four times, and paid only ten 
cents on the dollar, and who had three times assigned 
his property to relatives in an infamous manner. 
He was making a speech in a summer evening devo- 
tional gathering; and the shutters of the basement 
of the church were open, and the quick, sharp boys 
of the common were within hearing. This religious 
man was saying, " I am of the opinion that our con- 
gregation should all alone maintain a missionary on 
some foreign shore. For such a purpose I will my- 
self give a hundred dollars." — " Ten cents on the 
dollar? " said a boy outside the shutters of a win- 



CAN A PEKFECT BEING PERMIT EVIL? 169 

dow. [Applause.] Now, what if that boy had been 
placed face to face with that man for conversation 
on personal religion ? You say this is an extreme 
case; but, under our voluntary system, which, no 
doubt, teaches us religious activity and generosity, 
there will be, as our population grows, cases like this 
arising with alarming frequency in great towns, 
where men cannot watch each other, although they 
are members of the same church. Your voluntary 
system has priceless effects ; but one of its incidental 
disadvantages is, that, unless a spirit of most uncom- 
mon piety pervades and fires the church, you cannot 
shut out the dross you would not have, while you 
take in the gold you must have. Judas, in your 
voluntary church-system, often carries the bag ; 
often, I say, not always; and sometimes, when he 
does carry it, the infelicity is, that he rules the purse- 
strings, and will not go and hang himself. [Ap- 
plause.] What is the chief difficulty in such con- 
versations as we are many of us sure to be asked 
this winter to enter into with the unconverted? 
Hands not clean in business ; ledgers that will not 
bear a neighbor's glance ; a personal record behind 
the church-member which he dares not open to the 
world ; or, in brief, any lack of crystallineness that 
prevents the transmission of God's light through 
you. If we are indeed open to all the influences of 
conscience as the air is to the light, then, when the 
radiance of the sky behind the sky shines on us, it 
will shine through us; and it will be found that 
God's sunbeams will in such a sense penetrate us, 



170 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

that through us men may look into his face. But 
there are smutched windows, on the panes of which 
the soot and grime of city greed and fraud have 
fallen flake by flake. Who cares to look through 
them toward God ? That kind of dim religious light 
is not of the devoutest sort ; and the world knows 
the fact. 

No doubt, the disgusts of the world with the 
church are many of them unjustifiable ; and particu- 
larly is it improper for the pulpit to be called upon 
to be as brilliant twice or thrice a week as the lecture 
platform is once a year. We ask our ministry to 
perform arduous parish duties, and to be brilliant 
orators besides, three times or twice a week before 
the same audience, year after year. No such task is 
put upon any lecturer or upon any congressman. 
As matters stand, I think the average sermon is intel- 
lectually as able as the average congressional speech. 
You cannot have a Burke or Shakspeare in every 
editor's chair ; but pulpits are more numerous than 
newspapers. If, therefore, you think it natural that 
some of our newspapers should be the weakest of 
weeklies, and if some of them are conducted by men 
who make portions of our press lineal descendants 
of the reptiles that filled old Egypt, what must we 
say when pulpits, more numerous than editors' 
chairs, must all be filled by men who have charac- 
ter ? The American ministry, for intellectual equip- 
ment and general intellectual capacity, assuredly com- 
pares favorably with any other the world ever saw, 
and with any profession of equal numbers. 



CAN A PERFECT BEING PERMIT EVIL? 171 

But the world has a right to be disgusted if moral 
faults in the church sow the soil of religious society 
with the bowlders of distrust. When we cast in the 
ploughshare, when we try to turn up to God's noon 
the soil of New England to-day, we meet yet with 
bowlders enough beneath the soil. Some prayer- 
meetings you cannot get young men into any more 
than you can a rat into a trap without a bait ; and 
the reason is, that business-men are there who have 
no good record with society. Give me but a few 
princes in business, who are also princes in the 
church, — and there are some such princes in Boston ; 
they are not infrequently found throughout New 
England, although their names are infrequently her- 
alded, — give me princes among men, and I will give 
you princes who can set religious fashions of the 
divine sort easily. 

What are the chief parts of the religious conversa- 
tion which the religiously resolute should hold with 
the religiously irresolute ? I think four things 
should occur in every religious conversation of this 
endlessly sacred sort. First, let there be secret 
prayer on your part, of the kind that approaches 
God through total, affectionate, irreversible self-sur- 
render to conscience ; and this act will permeate you, 
by fixed natural law, with a strange power not your 
own. Unless you know how to obtain an equipment 
of entire genuineness, beware how you approach 
any human being on religious topics. Next ask the 
person you converse with, "What is your chief 
religious difficulty ? " It is vastly important to avoid 



172 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

debate in such secret moments, and it is yet more 
vastly important to turn all thoughts upon the deep- 
est inmost of conscience. This question T, for one, 
have found, in somewhat more than a hand's breadth 
of experience, quite as useful as any other in effect- 
ing both these objects. Perhaps the man with whom 
you converse does not know what his greatest diffi- 
culty is ; but, if you induce him to make an effort to 
state that difficulty, you will help him to solve it. 
Difficulty well stated is half solved. " What is the 
knot that chokes you ? " Perhaps he thinks of some 
secret sin of his own ; and thinks, also, that you have 
a greater secret sin. If he thinks this, you will not 
untie the knot ; perhaps he may untie yours. Noth- 
ing so stimulates a dead man as to set him at the 
work of reviving the dead. [Applause.] Try, next, 
to untie the knot by clear ideas and sound words. 
Then, lastly, kneel down with that man, and, by the 
contagious self-surrender of two souls face to face 
with the Unseen Holy, ask the Divine Nature to 
untie the knot. 

Give me a complete self-surrender of the will to 
God as both Saviour and Lord, and there is no knot 
that will not be untied in time. Indeed, whoever will 
untie that supreme knot of dissimilarity of feeling 
with God which now chokes us all, will find that he 
has done something strangely strategic ; he has 
brought into his service the law of the self-propagat- 
ing power of divine affections ; and little by little 
he will be taken into the fold, from behind which no 
force, human or infernal, has power to snatch him 



CAN A PERFECT BEING PEKMIT EVIL? 173 

out. Nay, not little by little ! On the instant of 
total self-surrender, the kneeling man may be 
crowned, or may have given him from on high a 
new, supreme passion. If he be really genuine in 
his self-surrender to God, there will, at the instant 
of such surrender, spring up in him a new life, con- 
sisting of a predominant love of what God loves, 
and a predominant hate of what God hates. Thus 
the drunkard will lose his thirst, as he cannot under 
any resolution of a merely secular sort. Thus, as a 
supreme miracle, she who might be queenly, she 
who had a mother pure as yours was, she whom you 
tread into the mire, she whom natural instincts of 
her own sex are the swiftest and none too swift to 
condemn, may have given her of Almighty God at 
the instant of her total and glad surrender to him, 
though never till then, the kiss which awaits a re- 
turning prodigal sister ; and, after his kiss, deserve 
yours. [Applause.] 

THE LECTURE. 

In the Singalese books of Gotama Buddha, written 
under the shadow of the Himalayas, we find the 
statement, that as surely as the pebble cast heaven- 
ward abides not there, but returns to the earth, so, 
proportionate to thy deed, good or ill, will the desire 
of thy heart be meted out to thee in whatever form 
or world thou shalt enter. It was the opinion of 
Socrates, recorded with favor by Plato, that u the 
wicked would be too well off if their evil deeds came 
to an end " (Jowett's Plato, Introduction to Phcefai). 



174 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

All disloyalty to the still small voice which declares 
what ought to be is followed by pain. What if it 
were not? Is God God, if, with unscientific liberal- 
ism, we in our philosophy put the throne of the 
universe upon rockers, and make of it an easy-chair 
from which lullabys are sung both to the evil and to 
the good ? 

Whatever we do, God is on our side ! So say 
many who would not dare to affirm, that, whatever 
we do, the nature of things is on our side. But the 
nature of things is only the total outcome of the 
requirements of the perfections of the Divine Nature. 
God is behind the nature of things ; and you and I 
cannot trifle with him any more than with it. He 
was ; he is ; he is to come. It was ; it is ; it is to 
come. It is he. 

Great literature always recognizes the law of moral 
gravitation. Seeking the deepest modern words, I 
open, for instance, Thomas Carlyle, and read : 

"'Penalties:' quarrel not with the old phraseology, good 
reader ; attend, rather, to the thing it means. The word was 
heard of old, with a right solemn meaning attached to it, from 
theological pulpits and such places, and may still be heard there, 
with a half meaning, or with no meaning, though it has rather 
become obsolete to modern ears. But the thing should not have 
fallen obsolete : the thing is a grand and solemn truth, expres- 
sive of a silent law of heaven, which continues forever valid. 
The most untheological of men may still assert the thing, and 
invite all men to notice it as a silent monition and prophecy in 
this Universe, to take it, with more of awe than they are wont, 
as a correct reading of the Will of the Eternal in respect of 
such matters, and in their modern sphere to bear the same well 
in mind. 



CAS - A PERFECT BEING PERMIT EVIL? 175 

" The want of loyalty to the Maker of this universe! — he 
who wants that, what else has he, or can he have? If you do 
not, you Man or you Nation, love the Truth enough, but try to 
make a chapman-bargain with Truth, instead of giving yourself 
wholly, soul and body and life to her, Truth will not live with 
you, Truth will depart from you; and only Logic, ' Wit ' (for 
example, ' London Wit '), Sophistry, Virtu, the ^Esthetic Arts, 
and perhaps (for a short while) Book-keeping by double entry, 
will abide with you. You will follow falsity, and think it truth, 
you unfortunate Man or Nation. You will, right surely, you 
for one, stumble to the Devil ; and are every day and hour, little 
as you imagine it, making progress thither" (Carlyle, Fred- 
erick the Great, vol. i. pp. 270, 271). 

This majestic keyoote of scientific, ethical truth is 
the deep tone that leads the anthem of all great 
thought since the world began. Open, now, Theo- 
dore Parker ; and how harshly his words clash with 
Carlyle's ! 

" The infinite perfection of God is the corner-stone of all my 
theological and religious teaching, the foundation, perhaps, of 
all that is peculiar in my system. It is not known to the Old 
Testament or the New ; it has never been accepted by any sect 
in the Christian world. The idea of God's imperfection has 
been carried out with dreadful logic in the Christian scheme. 
In the ecclesiastical conception of the Deity there is a fourth 
person in the Godhead, — namely, the Devil, — an outlying 
member, unacknowledged, indeed, the complex of all evil, but 
as much a part of Deity as either Son or Holy Ghost, and far 
more powerful than all the rest, who seem but jackals to provide 
for this roaring Hon " (Weiss, Life of Parker, vol. ii. p. 470). 

' ' God is a perfect Creator, making all from a perfect motive, 
for a perfect purpose. The motive must be love, the purpose 
welfare. The perfect Creator is a perfect Providence, love 
becoming a universe of perfect welfare." (Ibid., p. 471.) 



176 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

''Optimism is the religion of science." " Every fall is a 
fall upward." (Sermons on Theism, p. 408. See also pp. 147 
and 299.) 

One feels, in reading Theodore Parker, that, whatever 
we do, God is on our side. Carlyle is of a very differ- 
ent opinion. He is moved by no faith deeper than 
that the distinction between dnty and its opposite 
is " quite infinite." What is in the lines here in Par- 
ker is not so painful as what is between the lines. 
Place side by side this free-thinker Carlyle, and that 
free-thinker Parker, and ask which is the truer of 
the two to the deep intuitions of the soul. Con- 
trast the seriousness of Buddha, and the tone of 
this man of Massachusetts Bay. Compare Socra- 
tes and Plato under the shade of the Acropolis, 
with this modern man under the shade of — what ? 
Of a stunted mental philosophy, rooted well, in- 
deed, in our soil in his time, but only a very im- 
perfect growth as yet, and hardly risen above the 
ground, when the attempt was made here to deny 
the existence of sin, and of its natural wages in the 
universe in the name of an intuitive philosophy, 
which asserts precisely the opposite in both cases. 
[Applause.] 

Of course, gentlemen, you expect me not to skip 
the topic of the origin of evil ; for, after all, the 
question which touches that theme quite as often as 
any other drives men into intellectual unrest, throw- 
ing some into atheism, some into a denial of the 
authority of Scripture, some into various forms of a 
false, loose, unscholarly liberalism. 






CAN A PERFECT BEING PERMIT EVIL? 177 

What are the more important points which the nse 
of the scientific method can make clear on this mul- 
tiplex, overawing theme of the origin of evil ? 

1. There cannot be thought without a thinker. 

2. There is Thought in the universe. 

3. Therefore there is a Thinker in the universe. 

4. But a thinker is a Person. 

5. Therefore there is a Personal Thinker in the 
universe. 

You will grant me at least what Descartes made 
the basis of his philosophy, Oogito, ergo sum : " I 
think, therefore I am." I know that I think, and 
therefore I know that I am, and that I am a person. 
Agassiz says, in his Essay on Classification, that 
the universe " exhibits thought ; " and that is not a 
very heterodox opinion. You know with what mag- 
nificent logical, rhetorical, and moral power, the 
massive Agassiz, in that best of his books, gathers up 
range after range of the operations of the natural 
laws, and closes every paragraph with this language : 
" These facts exhibit thought," " these facts exhibit 
mind; " and so on and on, across heights of intellect- 
ual scenery, gigantic as his own Alps, and as little 
likely to be pulverized. [Applause.] When that 
man, in presence of the scientific world, bowed his 
head in silent prayer in the face of the audience at 
Penikese, he did it before a Person. What cared he 
for the lonely few sciolists who assume that there is 
no reason for holding their heads otherwise than 
erect in this universe ? As I contrast his mood and 
theirs, I think always of the old apologue of the 



178 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

heavy heads of wheat, and light heads: the heavy 
heads always bend. [Applause.] 

You say that you are sure you are a thinker, 
because you know there is thought in you. I know 
there is a Thinker in the universe, because there is 
Thought in it; and there cannot be thought without a 
thinker. [Applause.] There cannot be a here with- 
out a there. There cannot be a before without an 
after. Just so, in the nature of things, there cannot 
be a Thought without a Thinker. If we know there 
is Thought in the universe, let us quit all doubt 
about a Divine Thinker. 

What ! falling into anthropomorphism, are you ? 
That is a long word ; but it means making God too 
much like man. Stern Ethan Allen, who made a 
speech once near Lake George, in a fort the ruins of 
which were part of my playground in earliest years, 
said, in a book written to attack Christianity, " There 
must be some resemblance between the divine nature 
and the human nature. I do know some things, and 
God knows all things ; and therefore, in a few partic- 
ulars, there is resemblance between man and God" 
(Oracles of Reason). Anthropomorphism, or the 
likening of God to man, is not quite as bad as liken- 
ing God to mere blind physical force, is it ? Most 
of those who are shyest of what is called anthropo- 
morphism are advocates of a theory which likens 
God to what? To the highest we know? Not at 
all. To the next to the highest ? No. They liken 
him to one of the lowest things we know, — to mere 
physical force, which has in itself no thought or will. 



CA^T A PERFECT BEIiTG PEUMIT EVIL? 179 

Force, the unknown God, forsooth ? No doubt He 
whom we dare not name is behind all force ; but to 
take one of the lower manifestations of his power as 
that according to which we will describe his whole 
nature is far more scandalous than to take the lofti- 
est we know, and to say that God at least is equal to 
that ; and how much better neither man nor angel 
knows, or ever will. [Applause.] Descartes wrote, 
in a passage closely following his famous aphorism, 
and which ought to be as famous as that : " I must 
have been brought into existence by a Being at least 
as perfect as myself." The Maker must be better 
than his work. " He must transcend in excellence 
my highest imagination of perfection." 

Is it anthropomorphism to say that there cannot 
be thought without a thinker, and that there is 
Thought, and that therefore there must be a Thinker, 
in the universe ? That is a necessary conclusion 
from self-evident, intuitive, axiomatic truth. It is an 
inference as tremorless as the assertion, that, if there 
is a here, there is a there. So are we made, that we 
cannot deny, that, if there is Thought in the uni- 
verse, there must be a Thinker. Gentlemen, let us 
rejoice with a gladness as shoreless and reverent as 
this noon above our heads. Let us occupy our privi- 
leges. Let our souls go out to Him who holds the 
infinities and eternities in his palm as the small dust 
of the balance ! Let our thoughts, if possible, not faint 
as they pass from the planet which He governs by his 
will called gravitation, or from the winkings of our 
eyelids, which the Asiatic proverb says are numbered, 



180 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

up to the star surf of the galaxies in which all the 
drops are known by name to Him who makes no 
mistake. This Thinker, with omnipotence and om- 
niscience revealed by his works, ought to be holy. 
His unfathomable greatness raises the presumption 
of his holiness. 

But we are not left in doubt upon this theme ; for 
special light is given in the universe wherever doubt 
would be the most dangerous. 

6. Every law in nature is the method of action of 
some will. 

Having on previous occasions presented to you the 
proof of that proposition which ninety-five out of a 
hundred of the foremost names in physical science 
assert, I need do now no more than recite the names 
of Dana, Agassiz, Carpenter, Faraday, Helmholtz, 
Wundt, and Lotze, in support of a truth which trans- 
figures the universe. (See closing chapters of Car- 
penter's Mental Physiology.) 

7. There is in the universe an eternal law which 
makes for righteousness. 

Matthew Arnold is authority for that, although his 
outlook on religious science and philosophy is much 
like a woman's outlook on politics. [Applause.] 

8. The existence of that law is revealed in all outer 
experience or history. 

Even Matthew Arnold says, that, if you wish to 
know that fire will burn, you can put your hand in 
it and obtain proof ; and that you can, in the same 
experimental way, convince yourself that there is in 
history a Power, not ourselves, that makes for right- 
eousness. 



CAN A PERFECT BEING PERMIT EVTL ? 181 

9„ This law is revealed with vividness in the inner 
experience in all the natural operations of con- 
science. 

10. There is, therefore, in the universe a Holy 
Will. 

11. But a Holy Will can belong only to a Holy 
Person. 

12. But we know that the moral law is perfect ; 
for it requires invariably and unconditionally what 
ought to be. 

A fathomless deep that word ought ! An intuition 
of rightness and oughtness lies at the centre of it. 
In every individual, moral good is simply what ought 
to be, and moral evil what ought not to be, in the 
choices of the soul among motives. 

13. The Maker must be more glorious than the 
thing made. 

14. The 'perfection of the moral law inhering in the 
nature of things proves the perfection of the Divine 
Nature. 

15. The perfection of the moral law is a self-evident, 
axiomatic, intuitive truth. 

16. All objections to the belief that God is perfect 
are, therefore, shattered upon the incontrovertible fact 
of the perfection of the moral law. 

17. The perfection of the Divine Nature having 
been proved on the basis of axiomatic truth, it fol- 
lows that the present system of the universe is the 
best possible system, and that the present moral gov- 
ernment of the world is the best possible moral 
government of the world. 



182 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

18. In all investigations concerning the origin of evil, 
we must keep in the foreground the axiomatically 
demonstrated fact of the perfection of the Divine 
Nature. 

Gentlemen, there is no one here deeply impressed 
with the duty of using intuition, instinct, syllogism, 
and experiment as tests of truth, who will not grant 
me the proposition that there is a perfect moral law 
in the universe. There is no man here who grants 
me that proposition, who can analyze it in the light 
of self-evident truth, and not find himself obliged to 
admit, that, as there is a perfect moral law, there must 
be a perfect moral lawgiver. You will allow me, in 
view of previous discussions here, to use, from this 
point onwards, the incontrovertible deliverance 01 
the intuitional philosophy, that the existence in the 
nature of things of a perfect moral law implies the 
existence in the universe of a holy will ; which will can 
belong only to a Perfect Person. 

The perfection of the Divine Nature having been 
proved from the perfection of the moral law, what 
inferences follow as to the origin of evil ? 

1. It is a self-evident or intuitive truth that sin 
exists in this world. 

2. God is perfect. 

3. Why did God permit sin to exist ? 

4. Of the many answers to this question, all are, per- 
haps, conjectures. 

Take up Kant, and read his discussion of " Reli- 
gion inside the Range of Mere Reason," and you 
will find him concluding that the moral law itself, 



CAN A PERFECT BEING PERMIT EVIL? 183 

which he regarded as the sublimest tiling known to 
man, cannot be quite explained to the human under- 
standing. We know that this law has unconditioned 
authority ; and yet, if we try to go behind its un- 
conditional. " categorical imperative," " Thou ought- 
est " and " Thou shalt," we find ourselves stopped 
by something beyond our comprehension, although 
not behind our apprehension. Just so Julius Miiller, 
discussing the topic of the origin of evil, quotes this 
language of Kant's, and says that the student of reli- 
gious science need not be ashamed to say that the 
origin of evil is involved in much mystery (Miix- 
lee, Doctrine of Sin, vol. ii. p. 172). Although we 
can know some things, we do not pretend to know all 
things, concerning it. We may make many conjec- 
tures concerning it ; we may say that it arises in the 
abuse of the free will : but what led to that abuse of 
free will? The very arbitrariness of will when it 
chooses evil — was that the cause of the abuse of free 
will by itself? Miiller, you will remember, teaches 
explicitly, as Kant did implicitly, that the origin of 
evil is to be referred back to an extra-temporal ex- 
istence, where conditions unknown to man brought 
about the first sin. He would account for the origin 
of evil, not by what we see in this world, but by 
what may have occurred in some state of existence 
before this, and in which man was implicated as a 
personality. I am not adopting that portion of 
Julius Miiller's scheme of thought. Many of the 
deepest students of the theme affirm that we cannot 
explain the origin of evil without going back to a 
state of existence previous to this. 



184 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

5. Even among conjectures there may be a great 
choice. 

6. Is sin permitted, as a dragooning process, to 
eventuate in good at last ? 

No : for then sin ought to be ; and conscience affirms 
that it ought not to be. 

Is sin the necessary means of the greatest good ? 

No ; for the same reason. 

Has all sin an ultimately beneficial effect? or is 
every fall a fall upward ? 

No; for, if this be the case, there is reason to 
doubt whether God is perfectly benevolent. 

Let us suppose that there stands on the right, here 
in the universe, a marble staircase, and on the left a 
staircase of red-hot iron. Let both ascend to the 
same height, namely, to a universe from which all 
sin shall be eliminated. You go up by the marble 
staircase ; you reach that stage, — a universe in 
which there is no sin. You go up by the red-hot 
iron staircase ; you reach the same stage, — a uni- 
verse in which there is no sin. I beg you to be cau- 
tious now and here lest you be misled. I warn you 
that just here is the place where you will think I was 
too rapid, and that you did not quite know what you 
admitted. You say that all penalty for sin has a 
remedial tendency, and that ultimately we shall 
reach a state in which there will be no evil in the 
universe. Men are going up the red-hot iron stair- 
case. This represents the path of their suffering for 
sin. Ultimately, however, this staircase, you say, 
will bring all who go up it into freedom from all sin. 



CAN A PERFECT BEING PEEMIT EVIL? 185 

Be mercilessly clear. Could not God take men 
up the marble staircase to that same height? " Yes," 
you say. " He is omnipotent, omniscient." Do you 
admit that? Immense consequences turn on your 
being clear just here. God might take men up the 
marble staircase, which represents the path of holy 
free choice, and freedom from the penalties of sin. A. 
universe free from sin is what you wish to reach. 
Men may be taken up this marble staircase to that 
height ; or they may be taken up the red-hot iron 
staircase of suffering to the same height. 

I affirm that your theory of evil is dishonorable to 
God ; for we do know that men are going up on the 
fiery staircase. They are suffering remorse ; they are 
filled with anguish; and the outcome of all that 
suffering is to be only the attaining of a height to 
which God, according to your theory, might have 
raised them without any suffering at all. Therefore 
here are useless pains. He who inflicts them cannot 
be supremely benevolent. You might attain the plat- 
form which represents the absence of sin from the 
universe by that marble 'staircase : you are attaining 
it 8 by the red-hot iron staircase. Why does he per- 
mit men to ascend to that height by pain, when they 
might ascend to the same height without pain ? If 
he has no motive in that red-hot iron staircase, except 
to take men up, why does he not take men up by the 
cold marble f He is not taking men up by the cold 
marble : he is taking them up the other way. But if, 
as you say, he has no motive but to take men up ; if, 
as Theodore Parker said, every fall is a fall upward, 






186 TEANSCENDENTALISM. 



— how are you to prove the divine benevolence, 
face to face with his preference for that staircase, 
when he might have chosen the other ? 

Assuredly, the theory that all evil is a dragooning 
process, and that evil is the necessary means to the 
greatest good, not only is false to the intuitions 
which declare that evil ought not to be, but is in 
conflict with the truth that God is perfect. You 
cannot make it clear that God is perfect, if every fall 
is a fall upward ; for men might go up the marble 
staircase, whereas they do go up by the red-hot iron. 
There is some other reason for the red-hot iron than to 
take men up. 

The theory that every fall is a fall upward dishon- 
ors God. I know not but that billions of times more 
spirits go up the marble staircase than up the red-hot 
staircase ; but, if billions and billions do go that way, 
why could not you or I go that way. 

It is inadmissible to assert that a benevolent Being 
chooses to subject his creatures to extreme pain, and 
attains by that means nothing that he might not attain 
without pain. 

What answer does religious science give to the 
question as to the origin of evil? On this theme 
there are two strategic questions : 

1. Can God prevent sin in a moral system? 

2. Can God prevent sin in the best moral system ? 
Go to New Haven, and from the pupils of one of 

the profoundest and most original of New-England 
theologians, Dr. N. W. Taylor, you will find author- 
ity for answering these questions in this way : 



CAN A PERFECT BEING PERMIT EVIL? 187 

1. "Can God prevent sin in a moral system?" 

— "We do not know that lie can." 

2. "Can God prevent sin in the best moral sys- 
tem ? "— " No."— " How do you know ? "— " Because 
he has not prevented it." [Applause.] (See Tay- 
lor's Moral G-overnment.') 

Go to Andover and ask these questions, and you 
will find them answered in this way : 

1. "Can God prevent sin in a moral system?" — 
" Yes." — " How do you know? " — " Because he that 
can create can do any thing that is an object of 
power. God can do any thing that does not involve 
self-contradiction. We must suppose that a system 
of living beings, all with free wills, might be so influ- 
enced by motives as to retain their free will, and yet 
not sin. God can prevent sin in a moral system." 

" Can God prevent sin in the best moral system? " 

— "No." — "How do you know?" — "Because he 
has not prevented it." 

The Divine Perfection is proved by the perfection of 
the moral law. Sin exists. There is no conclusion pos- 
sible, except that- sin cannot be prevented ivisely. 

What are possibly some of the reasons why a per- 
fect God cannot wisely prevent sin in the best moral 
system? 

1. In the nature of things, there cannot be an 
upper without an under, a right without a left, a be- 
fore without an after, a good without, at least, the 
possibility of evil. 

2. In the nature of things, the gift of free agency 



188 TEANSCENDENTALISM. 

carries with it the possibility that the wrong as well as 
the right mag be chosen. 

3. In the nature of things, a created being must be 
a finite being. 

4. In the nature of things, a finite is an imperfect 
being. 

5. In the nature of things, there will be the possi- 
bility of less than absolutely perfect action in every less 
than absolutely perfect agent. 

6. Man is such an agent. 

Julius Miiller and Tholuck, in their earlier years, 
were wont to fall into long conversations upon the 
origin of evil ; and they at last fastened upon Leib- 
nitz's great thought, that the necessary limitations of 
power and wisdom in all finite beings leave open a 
possibility to evil. Do not think Leibnitz asserted 
that the limitations of the finite creature make evil 
necessary. He asserts only that they make evil possi- 
ble. I know that I am here not following the author- 
ity of Dr. Hodge of Princeton, who asserts that Leib- 
nitz makes evil a necessity in the universe. He does 
not, if Julius Miiller understands him. And, if some 
reading of the Theodicee proves any thing to me, 
Leibnitz means to assert only that the possibility of 
evil inheres in the very nature of things. If there is 
to be a created being brought into existence, that 
created being must be finite ; and as such must be, to 
a certain extent, an imperfect being ; and so may, not 
must, fall into sin. While the possibility of sin arises 
thus from the necessary limitation of the wisdom and 



CAN A PERFECT BEING PERMIT EYIL ? 189 

power of created beings, the fact of sin, according to 
Leibnitz, comes from abuse of free will. (See Mul- 
lee, Doctrine of Sin, vol. i., p. 276.) 

7. It may be that God cannot prevent sin, if he 
deals with finite creatures according to what is due 
to himself. 

8. It may be better to allow free agents to struggle 
with sin, and thus grow in the vigor of virtue, than 
to preserve them from such struggle, and thus allow 
them to remain weak. 

But, my friends, let us rejoice, that, after proving 
the Divine Perfection, we know enough for our peace 
as to the origin of evil. It is not at all necessary to 
establish the soundness of any of these conjectures; 
for none of them are needed to prove that God is 
perfect. 

In the heavens of the soul there ride unquenchable 
constellations, which assert that we alone are to 
blame if we do what conscience says we ought not to 
do. We are just as sure of the fact that we, and only 
we, are to blame when we do what conscience pro- 
nounces wrong, as we are of our own existence. Our 
demerit is a self-evident fact. All men take such 
guilt for granted. We know that we are responsible 
as surely as we all know that we have the power of 
choice. We know both facts from intuition. Our 
existence we know only by intuition ; and by that 
same axiomatic evidence we know our freedom. 
How does sin originate in us? By a bad free choice. 
Just so it originated in the universe. But God 



190 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

brought us into existence. Yes; and he maintains 
us in existence. Very well ; but the axioms of self- 
evident truth prove that he has given to us free will. 
The ocean floats the piratical vessels ; the sea-breeze 
fills the sails of the pirate ; but neither the ocean nor 
the sea-breeze is to blame for piracies. [Applause.] 



vm. 

THE RELIGION REQUIRED BY THE NATURE OF 
THINGS. 

THE SIXTY-SIXTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC- 
TURESHIP, IN TREMONT TEMPLE FEB. 19. 






: Um Mitternacht 
Kampft ich die Slacht, 
O Menscheit, deiner Leiden: 
Nicht konnt ich sie entscheiden 
Mit meiner Maclit 
Um Mitternacht. 

Um Mitternacht 
Hab' ich die Macht, 
Herr iiber Tod und Leben, 
In deine Hand gegeben: 
Du haltst die Wacht 
Um Mitternacht." 

Ruckert. 



" Miraris tu si Deus ille bonorum amantisshnus, qui illos quam 
optimos esse atque excellentissimos vult, fortunam illis cum qua 
exercentur adsignat ? " — Seneca. 



vni. 

THE RELIGION REQUIRED BY THE NA- 
TURE OF THINGS. 

PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. 

It would be a sad whim in the art of metallurgy 
if men should take up the notion that a white-heat 
is not useful in annealing metals ; and so it is a sad 
whim in social science when men think that the 
white-heat we call a religious awakening is not use- 
ful in annealing society. Twice this nation has been 
annealed in the religious furnace just previously to 
being called on to perform majestic civil duties. 
You remember that the thirsty, seething, tumultu- 
ous, incalculably generative years from 1753 to 1783, 
or from the opening of the French war to the close 
of the Revolution, were preceded by what is known 
to history as the Great Awakening in New England 
in 1740, under Whitefield and Edwards. So, too, in 
1857, when we were on the edge of our civil war, 
the whole land was moved religiously, and thus pre- 
pared to perform for itself and for mankind the 
sternest of all the political tasks that have been im- 
posed in this century upon any civilized people. 

193 



194 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

But our short American story is no exception to the 
universal experiences of social annealing. 

Discussing the subtler meaning of the Eeforma- 
tion, Carlyle says, " Once risen into this divine 
white-heat of temper, were it only for a season and 
not again, a nation is thenceforth considerable 
through all its remaining history. What immensi- 
ties of dross and crypto-poisonous matter will it not 
burn out of itself in that high temperature in the 
course of a few years ! Witness Cromwell and his 
Puritans, making England habitable even under the 
Charles Second terms for a couple of centuries more. 
Nations are benefited, I believe, for ages, by being 
thrown once into divine white-heat in this manner " 
(Cahlyle, History of Frederick, vol. i. book 3, chap, 
viii.). 

That is the historial law for nations, for cities, for 
individuals. Do not be afraid of a white-heat : it is 
God's method of burning out dross. [Applause.] 

Standing where Whitefield stood, on the banks of 
the Charles, a somewhat unlettered but celebrated 
evangelist, years ago, face to face with the culture of 
Harvard, was accused of leading audiences into ex- 
citement. " I have heard," said he in reply, " of a 
traveller who saw at the side of the way a woman 
weeping, and beating her breast. He ran to her and 
asked, c What can I do for you ? What is the cause 
of your anguish ? ' — ' My child is in the well ; my 
child is in the well ! ' With swiftest despatch assist- 
ance was given, and the child rescued. Farther on 
this same traveller met another woman wailing also, 



THE RELIGION OF THE NATURE OF THINGS. 195 

and beating her breast. He came swiftly to her, and 
with great earnestness asked, 4 What is your trou- 
ble ? ' — ' My pitcher is in the well ; my pitcher is in 
the well ! ' Our great social and political excite- 
ments are all about pitchers in wells, and our reli- 
gious excitements are about children in wells." [Ap- 
plause.] A rude metaphor, you say, to be used face 
to face with Harvard ; but a distinguished American 
professor, repeating that anecdote in Halle-on-tlie- 
Saale in Germany yonder, Julius Miiller heard it 
and repeated it in his university; and it has been 
used among devout scholars all over Germany. 
Starting here on the banks of the Charles, and lis- 
tened to, I presume, very haughtily by Cambridge 
and Boston, it has taken root in a deep portion of 
German literature as one of the classical illustrations 
of the value of a white-heat. [Applause.] 

We must beware how we fall into pride at the size 
of our present religious audiences; for Boston has 
seen greater assemblies than are now gathered here 
in revivals. I hold in my hand a very significant 
portion of George Whiteneld's journal, written in 
1740 in this city. Let us not forget that the doctrine 
of the new birth, which was drawn so incisively on 
the mind of New England by Whitefield and Ed- 
wards that it seems commonplace now, was, in their 
time, and in the form in which they taught the truth, 
a disturbing novelty. The doctrine of the new 
birth as an acertainable change was not generally 
admitted in the religious portion of any Xew-Eng- 
land community when the awakening of 1740 began. 



196 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

(See Tracy, History of the Great Awakening, pp. 46, 
130.) Whitefield taught, to the dismay of New Eng- 
land, that a man does not become a saint in his sleep ; 
and that credible evidence of personal entrance upon 
a life of love of what God loves, and of hate of what 
God hates, should be required before a man is made 
a member of the church; and that especially this 
change must take place in a minister ; otherwise he 
is unfit to lead the living or the dead. These doc- 
trines were not new to our Puritan fathers in 1640. 
But in 1740, under the political pressure caused by 
allowing only church-members to vote, and which 
led to the vastly mischievous, half-way covenant, by 
which persons not pretending to have entered on a 
new life at all were admitted to the church, we had 
lost the scientifically severe ideals of Plymouth Rock. 
It was a novel theory to us, that a man should be 
inexorably required to give credible evidence of a 
new life, as a condition of being allowed to preach. 

" I insisted much on the doctrine of the new birth," 
writes Whitefield (Journals in New England, London, 
1741, p. 48), " and also on the necessity of a minister's 
being converted before he could preach aright. Uncon- 
verted ministers are the bane of the Christian church. 
I think that great and good man, Mr. Stoddard, is 
much to be blamed for endeavoring to prove that uncon- 
verted men might be admitted into the ministry. A 
sermon lately published by Mr. Gilbert Tennent, 
entitled ' The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry,' 
I think unanswerable." "The spirit of the Lord 
enabled me to speak with such vigor against sending 



THE RELIGION OF THE NATURE OF THINGS. 197 

unconverted ministers into the ministry, that two 
ministers, with tears in their eyes, publicly confessed 
that they had lain hands on two young men, without 
so much as asking them whether they were born 
again of God or not" (p. 53). 

Whitefield spoke with such vigor on this topic, 
that at this moment we need no speaking on it at all. 
Rhetorical students sometimes express amazement at 
the ineffectiveness of the printed addresses of White- 
field when read to-day ; but they contain little that is 
new now, because they impressed so powerfully so 
much that was new then. Their present ineffective- 
ness arises from their past effectiveness. 

" Mr. Edwards," Whitefield wrote at Northampton 
(this is Jonathan Edwards, of whom you may have 
heard) " is a solid and excellent Christian. I think 
I may say I have not seen his equal in all New Eng- 
land " (p. 45). " He is a son himself, and hath also a 
daughter of Abraham for his wife. A sweeter couple 
I have not yet seen. Their children were dressed not 
in silks and satins, but plain. She talked feelingly 
and solidly of the things of God. She caused me 
to renew those prayers which I have put up to God, 
that he would be pleased to send me a daughter of 
Abraham to be my wife. I find, upon many accounts, 
it is my duty to marry" (p. 46). "Minister and 
people wept much" (p. 46). "Dear Mr. Edwards 
wept during the whole time of exercise " (p. 47). 

You say that in Boston yesterday, in audiences of 
six thousand and seven thousand, women wept too 
much, and that men were excited ; but in 1740 men 



198 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

like Jonathan Edwards wept ; and he is supposed to 
have had a head as well as a heart. 

Gaze a moment on what this city of Boston did 
when she was hardly more than a village, and while 
the frontier settlements of New England were yet in 
danger of intrusions from the savages. All that was 
mortal of George Whitefield lies on the shore of the 
sea at Newburyport yonder, at rest until the heavens 
be no more. When he bade adieu to New England, 
he spoke on the Boston Common, the very soil over 
which every day you and I are walking lightly, and 
wondering whether we cannot go hence in peace, 
whatever we do. This orator writes in Boston, Sun- 
day, Oct. 12, 1740, while no doubt the transfiguration 
of gold and russet and crimson hung upon some of 
the trees, of which we can now almost hear the whis- 
pering : " I went with the governor in his coach to 
the Common, where I preached my farewell sermon 
to nearly thirty thousand people, — a sight I have 
not seen since I left Blackheath, and a sight, perhaps, 
never before seen in America. It being duskish 
before I had done, the sight was more solemn. Num- 
bers, great numbers, melted into tears when I talked 
of leaving them. I was very particular in my appli- 
cation, both to rulers, ministers, and people; com- 
mended what was commendable ; blamed what was 
blameworthy; and exhorted my hearers steadily to 
imitate the piety of their forefathers ; so that, wheth- 
er I was present or whether I was absent, I might 
hear of their affairs, that with one heart and mind 
they were striving together for the faith of the gos- 



THE RELIGION OF THE NATURE OF THINGS. 199 

pel" (p. 53). So Boston responded to the memory 
of Cromwell and Hampden and Milton. She was 
yonng, and she yet is in the gristle. Is there better 
blood to pnt into her veins than that of our fathers ? 
[Applause.] 

THE LECTURE. 

When Ulysses sailed past the isle of the sirens, 
who had the power of charming by their songs all 
who listened to them, he heard the sorcerous music 
on the shore ; and, to prevent himself and his crew 
from landing, he filled their ears with wax, and bound 
himself to the mast with knotted thongs. Thus, 
according to the subtle Grecian story, he passed 
safely the fatal strand. But when Orpheus, in 
search of the Golden Fleece, went by this island, he, 
being, as you remember, a great musician, set up 
better music than that of the sirens, enchanted his 
crew with a melody superior to the alluring song of 
the sea-nymphs ; and so, without needing to fill the 
Argonauts' ears with wax, or to bind himself to the 
mast with knotted thongs, he passed the sorcerous 
shore, not only safely, but with disdain. 

The ancients, it is clear from this legend, under- 
stood the distinction between morality and religion. 
He who, sailing past the island of temptation, has 
enlightened selfishness enough not to land, although 
he rather wants to ; he who, therefore, binds himself 
to the mast with knotted thongs, and fills the ears of 
his crew with wax ; he who does this without hear- 
ing a better music, is the man of mere morality. 
Heaven forbid that I should underrate the value of 



200 TKANSCENDENTALISM. 

this form of cold prudence ; for wax is not useless in 
giddy ears, and Aristotle says youth is a perpetual 
intoxication. Face to face with sirens, thongs are 
good, though songs are better. 

" Sin hath long ears. Good is wax, 
Wise at times the knotted thongs ; 

But the shrewd no watch relax, 
Yet they nse like Orpheus songs. 

They no more the Sirens fear ; 
They a better music hear." 

When a man of tempestuous, untrained spirit must 
swirl over amber and azure and purple seas, past the 
isle of the sirens, and knots himself to the mast of 
outwardly right conduct by the thongs of safe resolu- 
tions, although as yet duty is not his delight, he is 
near to virtue. He who spake as never mortal spoke 
saw such a young man once, and, looking on him, 
loved him, and yet said, as the nature of things 
says also, " One thing thou lackest." Evidently he 
to whom duty is not a delight does not possess the 
supreme prerequisite of peace. In presence of the 
siren shore, we can never be at rest while we rather 
wish to land, although we resolve not to do so. Only 
he who has heard a better music than> that of the 
sirens, and who is affectionately glad to prefer the 
higher to the lower good, is, or in the nature of 
things can be, at peace. Morality is Ulysses bound 
to the mast. Religion is Orpheus listening to a 
better melody, and passing with disdain the sorcerous 
shore. [Applause.] 



THE EELIGION OF THE NATURE OF THINGS. 201 

Aristotle was asked once what the decisive proof is 
that a man has acquired a good habit. His answer 
was, " The fact that the practice of the habit involves 
no self-denial of predominant force among the facul- 
ties." Assuredly that is keen ; but Aristotle is 
rightly called the surgeon. Until we do love virtue 
so that the practice of it involves no self-denial of that 
sort, it is scientifically incontrovertible, that we can- 
not be at peace. In the very nature of things, while 
Ulysses wants to land, wax and thongs cannot give 
him rest. In the very nature of things, only a better 
music, only a more ravishing melody, can preserve 
Orpheus in peace. This truth may be stern and 
unwelcome ; but the Greek mythology and the Greek 
philosophy which thus unite to affirm it are as lumi- 
nous as the noon. 

What is the distinction between morality and 
religion, and how can the latter be shown by the 
scientific method to be a necessity to the peace of the 
soul? 

1. Conscience demands that what ought to be should 
be chosen by the will. 

2. In relation to persons, what we choose we love. 

3. Conscience reveals a Holy Person, the Author 
of the moral law. 

4. Conscience, therefore, demands that Tightness 
and oughtness in motives should not only be obeyed, 
but loved. 

5. It demands that the Ineffable Holy Person re- 
vealed by the moral law should not only be obeyed, 
but loved. 



202 TEANSCENDENTALISM. 

6. This is an unalterable demand of an unalterable 
portion of our nature. 

7. As personalities, therefore, we must keep com- 
pany with this part of our nature, and with its 
demand, while we exist in this world and the next. 

8. The love of God by man is, therefore, inflexibly 
required by the nature of things. Of all the com- 
mandments of exact science this is the first : Thou 
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind and 
might and heart and strength. 

9. Conscience draws an unalterable distinction 
between loyalty and disloyalty to the Ineffable Holy 
Person the moral law reveals, and between the obe- 
dience of slavishness and that of delight. 

10. Only the latter is obedience to conscience. 

11. But morality is the obedience of selfish slavish- 
ness. 

That sounds harsh ; but by it I mean only that a 
man of mere morality is Ulysses bound with thongs. 
He intelligently chooses not to land; but he wishes 
to do so. He loves what conscience declares ought 
not to be. His chief motive is selfishness acting 
under the spur of fear. In the nature of things, the 
fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom ; but the 
end of wisdom is the perfect love that casteth out 
fear. [Applause.] You say that I have been ap- 
pealing to fear. Very well, that is the beginning of 
wisdom, and I do not revere highly any love of God 
that has never known any fear of God. Show me 
that kind of love of God which has not felt what the 
fear of God is, and I will show you not principle, but 



THE RELIGION OF THE NATURE OF THINGS. 203 

sentiment, not religion, but religiosity. Of necessity, 
loyalty fears disloyalty. But loyalty is love for the 
Holy Person the moral law reveals; and such love 
conscience inexorably demands as what ought to be. 

12. Religion, as contrasted with morality, is the 
obedience of affectionate gladness. It is the proud, 
rejoicing, unselfish, adoring love which conscience 
demands of man for the Ineffable Holy Person which 
conscience reveals. 

13. As such, only religion, and not morality, can 
harmonize the soul with the nature of things. 

So much may be clearly demonstrated by exact 
research. 

Shakspeare says of two characters who conceived 
for each other a supreme affection as soon as they 
saw each other, 

"At the first glance they have changed eyes." 

Tempest, act i. sc. 2. 

The Christian is a man who has changed eyes with 
God. In the unalterable nature of things, he who has 
not changed eyes with Gcod cannot look into his face in 
peace. 

What is that love which conscience says ought to 
be given by the soul to the Ineffable Holy Person 
which the moral law reveals ? Is it a love for a frag- 
ment of that person's character, or for the whole? 
for a few, or for the whole list, of his perfect attri- 
butes ? 

14. In the nature of things, a delight in not only 
a part, but in all, of God's attributes, is necessary to 
peace in his presence. 



204 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

15. A religion consisting in the obedience of affection- 
ate gladness, or a delight in all God's attributes, is 
therefore scientifically known to be a demand of the 
nature of things. 

It will not be to-morrow, or the day after, that 
these fifteen propositions will cease to be scientificall}- 
certain. Out of them multitudinous inferences flow, 
as Niagaras from the brink of God's palm. In a 
better age, philosophy will often pause to listen to 
these deluging certainties poured from the Infinite 
Heights of the nature of things. The roar and 
spray of them almost deafen and blind whoever stands 
where we do now : but they are there, although we 
are deaf; they are there, although we are blind. 

Three inferences from these fifteen propositions 
are of supreme importance : 

1. It is a sufficient condemnation of any scheme of 
religious thought to show that it presents for worship 
not all, but oiAj a fragment, of the list of the divine 
attributes. 

2. A religion that is true to the nature of things 
in theory will, of course, be found to work well in 
practice. The true in speculation is that which is 
harmonious with the nature of things. The fortu- 
nate in experience is that which is in harmony with 
the nature of things. The true in speculation, there- 
fore, will turn out to be the fortunate in experience 
when applied to practice. If a scheme of thought 
does not work well in the long ranges of experience, 
if it will not bear translation into life age after age, 
that scheme of thought is sufficiently shown to be in 
collision with the nature of things. 



THE RELIGION OF THE NATURE OF THINGS. 205 

3. By all the tests of intuition, instinct, experi- 
ment, and syllogism, religious science must endeavor 
to obtain the fullest view possible to man of the 
whole list of the divine attributes. 

What scheme of religious thought will bear these 
three tests best? 

Does such underrating of the significance of sin, 
as Theodore Parker's absolute religion is guilty of, 
work well in the long range of experience ? All reli- 
gious teaching that in a wide and multiplex trial does 
not hear good fruits is presumably out of accord with 
the nature of things. Does the doctrine that every 
fall is a fall upward bear good fruits? Does the 
assertion that sin is a necessary, and, for the most 
part, an inculpable stage in human progress, improve 
society? Does the proposition that character does 
not tend to a final permanence, bad as well as good, 
and good as well as bad, work well when translated 
into life age after age ? 

Gentlemen, let us make a distinction between false 
and true liberalism. Let us speak with proper respect 
of a learned, cultured Christian liberalism. Let us 
speak with proper disrespect of a lawless, limp, lav- 
ender liberalism. It has been the fault of the latter 
style of unscientific liberalism in every "age, and it is 
especially the fault of Theodore Parker's theism, that 
it represents only a fragment of the divine attributes 
as the whole list. 

The supreme question, then, my friends, if you are 
convinced that man cannot have peace unless he has 
a delight in all attributes of the Holy Person revealed 



206 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

by the moral law, is to know what the full list is. 
Whether Boston 1 cares, or Harvard, to know what the 
natural conditions of the soul's peace with the nature 
of things are, I do not know ; but, for one, I feel very- 
sure I am going hence, and that I wish to go hence 
in peace, and that I cannot go hence in peace unless 
I love, not only a fragment, but the whole list, of the 
divine attributes. 

What can science of the ethical sort do toward 
presenting us with a full view of the divine attri- 
butes ? That is a very central and a very strategic 
question. Suppose, in order to make our thoughts 
clear, that we begin our answer by substituting scien- 
tific for biblical phraseology. Try for once the experi- 
ment, and see how we shall come out. Everybody 
admits there is a nature of things. Now, what if we 
assert simply that it is necessary to the soul's peace 
to acquire harmony with the nature of things? Say 
nothing about God now. It is certain that there is 
in the universe what science calls the nature of things ; 
and it is tolerably clear that that has not changed 
much for some years. [Applause.] It is without 
any variableness or shadow of turning. It was ; it 
is ; it is to come. For one, when I ask the question 
whether I can know God, I am always asking, imme 
diately after that, whether I can know the nature of 
things. What if the nature of things is but another 
name for his nature ? What if the nature of things, 
which has not changed in eternity past, and is not to 
change in eternity to come,' is but a revelation of 
Him, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow 



THE RELIGION OF THE NATURE OF THINGS. 207 

of turning ? I know that the nature of things is 
infinitely kind toward virtue. I know that the nature 
of things is infinitely stern toward vice. What if, 
while science gazes on the nature of things, and 
looks fixedly into it, she finds behind it the will of a 
personal God, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, 
invisible, but in conscience spiritually tangible ? 

1. In the nature of things, to work for good is to 
work against evil. 

Does anybody doubt this ? Is not that a proposi- 
tion just as clearly true as that a straight line is the 
shortest distance between two points, or that a thing 
cannot be, and not be, at the same time, and in the 
same sense, as any other intuitive deliverance of our 
faculties ? 

2. In the nature of things, God cannot work for 
good without working against evil. 

I am assuming only that God cannot deny himself. 
That cannot is to me at once the most terrible and 
the most alluring certainty in the universe. He can- 
not deny the demands of his own perfections. These 
are another name for the nature of things. We feel 
sure, that, in the nature of things, there cannot be a 
here without a there, an upper without an under, or 
any working of God for good without working by 
him against evil. The nature of things is not fate, 
but the unchangeable free choice of infinite perfec- 
tion in God. 

Allow no one to mislead you by overlooking the 
distinctions between certainty and necessity, will and 
shall, occasioning and necessitating, infallibly certain 



208 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

and inevitably certain. Let no one assert that faith- 
fulness to self-evident truths as to the nature of 
things leads to a system of thought consisting of 
adamantine fatalism. There can be but one best way 
in which to conduct the universe. Omniscience will 
know that way. Omnipotence will choose and ad- 
here to that way. There will be no deviation from 
that way in the course of the government of the uni- 
verse. There will thus appear to be fate in the infin- 
ities and eternities ; but there is there in reality only 
the infinitely wise and holy, and therefore unchan- 
ging, free choice of Almighty God. 

Even man's free will may illustrate the law of cer- 
tainty without falling at all under that of necessity. 

Near the great sea there lives yonder at Salisbury 
a renowned poet, on whom the light of the golden 
Indian summer of genius is now shining. It was 
once my surprising fortune to hear this revered man 
say seriously that he could not quite agree with An- 
dover and Jonathan Edwards in wholly denying the 
freedom of the will. I made no attempt to correct 
this error ; for I had proper reverence for that poet 
whom Germany regards as the deepest heart among 
all American writers of lyrics (see Beockhaus' Con- 
versations Lexicon, art. " Whittier "), a man in whom 
there is an unquenchable Hebrew fire, which quite as 
effectively as any other flame, moved before us as a 
pillar of radiance in the dark days of our antislavery 
contest. [Applause.] 

Now, it may be that Andover does not understand 
Jonathan Edwards; but she does not understand 



THE RELIGION OF THE NATURE OF THINGS. 209 

Tirm to deny the freedom of the will. And as for 
denying the freedom of the will herself, you might 
as well ask whether Andoyer denies the immor- 
tality of the soul, or whether Jefferson Davis 
asserted that federal power ought to be supreme over 
State rights, or whether Plymouth Rock will float. 
There is no monstrosity greater as a misconception 
than to affirm that New-England theology denies the 
freedom of the will: and yet I see that affirmation 
made almost monthly by irresponsible scribblers, and 
now and then responsibly, over names which I 
honor. 

3. In the nature of things, God is not God, unless 
he works for good. 

4. Therefore, in the nature of things, he is not 
God, unless he works against evil. 

5. He is perfect ; and therefore, with all his attri- 
butes, he works for good. 

6. He is perfect; and therefore, with all his attri- 
butes, he works against evil. 

7. Sin exists in the universe by the abuse of free 
will. 

It is incontrovertible that conscience declares that 
we, and we alone, are to blame when we do what 
we know to be wrong. Of course, I keep in mind 
the distinction between an error and sin, or between 
a mistake of the moral kind and a wrong of the 
moral kind. When I speak of sin, I mean a free 
choice of motives which conscience pronounces to be 
bad. In every bad free choice there comes upon the 
soul, after the act, a sense of personal demerit. If 



210 TEANSCENDENTALISM. 

that deliverance of the self-evident truths of the 
soul is not to be received, several rather large results 
follow. 

If you deny the intuition which proves that the 
will is free, you cannot prove your own existence ; 
for you know your own existence only by intuition. 
How do I know there is an eternal world ? By in- 
tuition. How do I know that I am in existence? 
By intuition. How do I know that I am personally 
to blame when I do what conscience pronounces 
wrong? By intuition. We are not to play fast 
and loose with this supreme test of truth. Intuition 
is the soul's direct vision of all truths which to man 
have these three characteristics, — self-evidence, neces- 
sity, universality. An intuition may mean a truth, self- 
evident, necessary, and universal ; or it may mean the 
act of the mind in beholding such a truth. When I 
say any thing is affirmed by intuition, I mean that 
it is guaranteed by that capacity of the soul through 
which we have a direct vision of self-evident, axiom- 
atic, necessary truth. It is an intuitive truth that 
the will is free ; and, as Johnson used to say, " there 
is the end of it." We know we are to blame when 
we choose the wrong ; and there is an end of that. 
If you know by self-evident, axiomatic, necessary, 
universal truth that you exist, you know by the 
same evidence that you are free, and that you have 
incurred personal demerit whenever you choose a 
motive which conscience pronounces to be a bad one. 

What you take for granted in business, and in 
law, and in literature, you must allow me to take as 
proved in religious science. 



THE RELIGION OF THE NATURE OF THINGS. 211 

Does anybody doubt that he is free in business ? 
Very well : will anybody doubt, then, that he is free 
in religion? Does anybody doubt that God gives 
the harvest, but that nevertheless man must sow and 
plant ? Does not the husbandman every spring go 
forth and act as if every thing depended on him ? 
and does not God work with him to fill the valley 
with fatness ? Just so in the spiritual realm : a man 
must go forth and sow good seed ; and God will give 
the increase. There is no collision in business be- 
tween freedom of will and fate ; and so, as the laws 
of the universe are the same in both fields, there is 
no collision in religion. Predestination does not 
mean destiny. This is one of the most mischievous 
words in theology ; and the trouble is with the sylla- 
ble "dest." I never use the word predestination; 
for that syllable " dest " implies destiny, and destiny 
implies necessity. In religious science the word 
"predestination" does not mean necessity, but only 
certainty. 

8. While sin continues, God cannot forgive it without 
making the sinner worse. 

In this city six thousand people were told, the 
other evening, with great depth of thought, that if a 
child deliberately lies, and you forgive the child be- 
fore he has exhibited any sorrow for the act, you 
make the child worse. That is, indeed, a very simple 
instance of the moral law; but in scientific minds 
there is no doubt that the moral law is equally uni- 
versal with the physical. If you will measure a little 
arc of the physical law, you can measure the whole 
circle. 



212 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

If I were to take flight into space, I should not 
run beyond the knowledge that I have acquired here 
of the law of gravitation. That law is one in all 
worlds so far as science knows. So, too, if I under- 
stand the properties of light here, I understand them 
in Orion and the Pleiades. A good terrestrial text- 
book on light or gravitation would be of service in 
the North Star. The universality and the unity of 
law make our earth, although but an atom, immensity 
itself in its revelations of truth. (See Dana, Greol- 
ogy, chap. 1.) Now, if I know that a man has delib- 
erately lied to me, I cannot here, under the moral 
law, forgive him before he repents, without making 
him worse. If I know that, then there is reason to 
believe that God cannot, in the nature of things, for- 
give a free agent that has incurred personal demerit 
by the choice of wrong motives, till he has repented, 
without making that agent worse. [Applause.] 
The nature of things, gentlemen — it is the same 
yesterday, to-day, and forever. 

Here is a Boston sonnet, entitled " A Far Shore ; " 
and it asserts the universality of the moral law as 
well as of the physical and the organic ; and so it 
applies not only to Greece and Italy, and the shadow 
of the Pyramids, but also to the shore of that undis- 
covered country from whose bourn no traveller 
returns : 

On a far shore my land swam far from sight, 
But I could see familiar native stars ; 
My home was shut from me by ocean bars, 

Yet home hung there above me in the night; 



THE RELIGION OF THE NATURE OF THINGS. 213 

Unchanged fell down on me Orion's light ; 
As always, Venus rose, and fiery Mars; 
My own the Pleiads yet; and without jars 

In wonted tones sang all the heavenly height. 

So when in death, from underneath my feet 

Rolls the round world, I then shall see the sky 
Of God's truths burning yet familiarly; 

My native constellations I shall greet : 
I lose the outer, not the inner eye, 
The landscape, not the soul's stars, when I die. 

[Applause.] 

9. The self-propagating power of habit, acting in 
the sphere of holy affections, places the nature of 
things on the side of righteousness. 

10. The same self- propagating power of habit, 
acting in the sphere of evil affections, arranges the 
nature of things against evil. 

11. Good has but one enemy, the evil ; but the 
evil has two enemies, the good and itself. [Ap- 
plause.] (See Julius Muller, Doctrine of Sin, 
vol. ii.) 

12. Judicial blindness increases the self-propagat- 
ing power of evil ; remunerative vision increases the 
self-propagating power of holiness. 

" Every man," says the Spanish proverb, " is the 
son of his own deeds." " Every action," says Kich- 
ter, " becomes more certainly an eternal mother than 
it is an eternal daughter" (Titan, vol. i. cycle 
105). These are the irreversible laws according to 
which all character tends to a final permanence, 
good or bad. 

13. God cannot give the wicked two chances with- 
out subjecting the good to two risks. 



214 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

14. Self-evident truth shows that man is free. 

15. Self-evident truth proves. that man may attain 
a final permanence of character, good or bad, and in 
that state, not lose freedom of will. 

16. This may occur in the best possible universe, in 
which all things will of course work together for good to 
the good, and therefore, of necessity, for evil to the evil. 

Adhere to the proposition that there cannot be an 
upper without an under. Can God arrange the uni- 
verse so that all things in it shall work together for 
the good of the good, without arranging it so that 
all things shall work together for the evil of the evil ? 
Can God be God, and not arrange the universe so 
that all things in it shall work together for the good 
of the good ? Can God be God, and not so arrange 
the universe, that all things shall work together for 
the evil of the evil ? Follow the deliverance of your 
intuitional philosophy, that the soul is free. I know 
how a man is tempted here, and how a silly sciolism 
will overturn the testimony of the intuitions them- 
selves, rather than admit that man is responsible for 
all action that conscience pronounces wrong. But, if 
you overturn the deliverance of the intuitions there, 
please overturn it elsewhere. You will not play fast 
and loose much longer, gentlemen ; for our age is 
coming to be, thank God, unwilling to take any thing 
for granted, and more and more loyal to clear ideas. 
[Applause.] Our greatest philosophies, metaphysi- 
cal and physical, all stand on the basis of self-evident 
truths, or intuition ; and although your physicist who 
never has studied metaphysics does not know who 



THE RELIGION OF THE NATUBE OF THTN"GS. 215 

sharpened his tools, or sometimes what his tools are, 
he every day is using self-evident truth, and stands 
on the intuitions at which he scoffs. You say that 
the intuitional philosophy sails by dead - reckoning. 
Well, dead-reckoning by axioms is scientific. You 
say that the philosophy of self-evident truths is off 
soundings, and that you prefer to keep in water 
where you can feel the bottom. I tell you that your 
sounding-lines themselves are spun by what you call 
dead-reckoning, or the philosophy of self-evident, 
axiomatic, necessary truths. [Applause.] Your 
physicist has no scientific rule, the validity of which 
is not guaranteed by self-evident truth ; and so when 
you say I sail by dead-reckoning, and am off sound- 
ings, and that you are sounding and sounding, and 
that you know there is an external world, and that 
you believe only what you can see and touch and 
handle, I go behind your sounding-line, and ask, 
" Who spun that ? " I ask, " How are you certain 
there is any external world ? " You say, " It is 
evident." So I say, " It is self-evident." [Applause.] 
On self-evidence you stand, and on self -evidence I 
stand; and, if you and I can shake hands at this 
point, we shall never part. [Applause.] If we are 
true to the deliverance of all the intuitions, and not 
merely to a portion of them, we shall vividly behold 
truth of which neither materialism nor pantheism 
dreams. We shall see God in not merely a few of 
his attributes, but in that whole range of them, 
which the nature of things exposes to human vision ; 
and we shall find it a thing just as glorious to be 



216 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

reconciled with God as it is to be reconciled with 
the nature of things, and just as little likely to 
occur in a man asleep, or by accident and hap- 
hazard, and dreaming and poetizing. 

We shall find it a thing at least as terrible to fall 
under the power of God as it is to fall under the 
power of the nature of things. Assuredly the nature 
of things will not break the bruised reed, nor quench 
the smoking flax, of loyalty to itself; the nature 
of things assuredly, too, may be a consuming fire 
to all disloyalty to itself. [Applause.] It may be 
an omnipresent kiss or an omnipresent flame. The 
savages in Peru used to kiss the air as their pro- 
foundest sign of adoration to the collective divinities. 
The nature of things is above and around and 
beneath us ; and our sign of adoration to it must be 
not slavish self-surrender, but affectionate, glad pref- 
erence of what this unbending perfection requires. 

You say the permanent existence of sin would be 
an impeachment of the divine benevolence. Why is 
not the beginning of it an impeachment ? The mys- 
tery, my friends, is not, that, under the law of judicial 
blindness and the self-propagating power of habit, 
sin may continue : the mystery is, that sin ever was 
allowed to begin. It has begun. There is no doubt 
on that subject, and, when you will explain to me the 
consistency of your philosophy with the beginning 
of sin, I will explain to you the consistency of a 
final permanence of free evil character with that 
same philosophy. [Applause.] 

What we do know is, that, the more a man sins 



THE RELIGION OF THE NATURE OF THINGS. 217 

against light, the less sensitive he is to it. What 
we do know is, that over against judicial blindness 
stands remunerative vision, and we cannot change one 
law without changing the other. The nature of 
things is the flame ; the nature of things is the kiss : 
God is God by. being both. [Applause.] What 
God does is successfully done. What God does is 
well done. 

Mrs. Browning, whom England loves to call 
Shakspeare's daughter, and who is in many respects 
the deepest interpreter of the modern cultivated 
heart and head, rests in God's goodness. 

" Oh the little birds sang east, the little birds sang west! 
And I said in underbreath, All our life is mixed with death, 
And who knoweth which is best ? 

Oh the little birds sang east, the little birds sang west ! 

And I smiled to think God's goodness flows around our incom- 



Round our restlessness his rest." 

Had she paused there, she would not have been the 
prophetess of science as she is ; for, without resting 
in an unscientific liberalism, she says also : 

" Let star-wheels and angel-wings, with their holy winnowings, 
Keep beside you all your way, 

Lest in passion you should dash, with a blind and heavy crash, 
Up against the thick-bossed shield of God's judgment in the 
field." 

Rime of the Duchess May. 
[Applause.] 



rx. 



THEODOKE PARKER ON COMMUNION WITH GOD AS 
PERSONAL. 

THE SIXTY-SEVENTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY 
LECTURESHIP, IN TREMONT TEMPLE FEB. 26. 



" Religion ist anfangs G-ottlehre; recht ist sie Gottseligkeit. Auf 
Marktplatz und Schlachtfeld stela' ich mit zugeschlbssener Brust, 
worin der Allhocliste und Allheiligste mit mir spricht, und vor mir 
als nahe Sonne ruht." — Richter: Levana. 



" So schaff' ich am sausenden 
Webstuhl der Zeit." 

Goethe: Faust. 



IX. 



THEODORE PARKER ON COMMUNION 
WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 

PRELUDE ON CTTEEENT EVENTS. 

One day in Parliament William Pitt said, " I have 
no fear for England : she will stand till the day of 
judgment." But Edmund Burke replied, " What I 
fear is the day of no judgment." The relation of 
the temperance reform to the future of great cities 
has an unsounded depth of interest from Edmund 
Burke's point of view. In 1800 one twenty-fifth of 
the population of the United States was in towns 
numbering eight thousand or more inhabitants; in 
1870 one-fifth (Wale^e, Statistical Atlas, 1876). 

Of course I need not emphasize the fact that 
many of our churches are doing their duty on the 
topic of temperance in great towns. I do not over- 
look starry exceptions. I remember that Roswell 
Hitchcock's church in New York was once called 
together in order that two persons who had joined 
it might have work assigned them on the church 
philanthropic committees. There was no other busi- 
ness before the gathering than to set two persons at 

221 



222 TBAJ^SCENDENTAUSM. 

work ; the only ones out of a very large church who 
had not something definite to do in our sorely-tried 
metropolis. Other individual churches are active, 
but the mass of our churches are singularly inefficient 
[applause] , in moral reform in cities. The other day 
I saw a heap of manuscript books, in which the 
names of the most abandoned streets and lanes in 
this city were written down, and in which a compe- 
tent number of fit persons were assigned to the work 
of visitation in these desolate quarters. Now, is it 
not a circumstance rather humiliating that a man 
who is comparatively a stranger in this city must 
come half way across the continent to set us here in 
Boston at work which we ought to know better 
than he does how to do? Is it not a fact somewhat 
inexpressible in its wincing outcome, as it touches 
our poor pride, to know that many a town in New 
England, Boston not excepted from the list, is allow- 
ing a Young Men's Christian Association, for in- 
stance, that wishes to do just such work as this, to 
starve ? You are not giving half money enough to 
the agents you employ for religious effort among the 
poor and degraded in cities ; and you do not work 
yourselves. You act through the finger-tips of a few 
saints ; women missionaries, city missionaries ; and 
you are starving them. There is not a city missionary, 
there is not an established religious agency of yours 
among the perishing and dangerous classes and their 
fleecers, that has adequate financial support, to say 
nothing of sympathy. You say this is plain speech ; 
but I had rather speak plainly than bring upon my- 



COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 223 

self the charge of being inattentive to what has been 
brought so prominently before New England in the 
great audiences in the noon yonder in the Taber- 
nacle, when reformed men have spoken and been ad- 
dressed, in the presence of thousands, in tears. We 
need every season just such effort as is now mak- 
ing temporarily here for the abandoned quarters in 
this and other cities. 

There is in Boston a great orator, whose name is 
a power from the surf of the Bay of Fundy to the 
waterfalls of the Yosemite. Stand in front of his 
house, in the street where Slavery once mobbed him, 
and you may count thirty grog-shops within sight 
of his windows. Yes: Wendell Phillips told you 
the other day that he could count thirty-nine, and 
that for thirteen of these only is Massachusetts law 
responsible. The truth is, that the Church, after all, 
is, or should be, the sheet-anchor of all moral reform. 
I do not undervalue Washingtonianism ; I do not 
undervalue temperance legislation ; in fact, although 
there may be no one prohibitory law with all the de- 
tails of which I should sympathize, yet I must call 
myself a prohibitionist. [Cheers and a few hisses. 
Mr. Cook turned to the quarter from which the 
hisses proceeded, and said] , Wait two hundred years, 
and see whether you will hiss prohibition ! Wait 
until Macaulay's two hundred are the average num- 
ber of inhabitants for every square mile between 
Plymouth Rock and the Golden Gate, and see 
whether you will hiss prohibition ! Wait until a 
quarter of our population shall be massed in cities, 



224 TBAtfSCENDENTALISM. 

and Edmund Burke's day of no judgment appears, 
and see whether you will hiss prohibition ! 

Massachusetts now has laws by which sales of 
liquor are forbidden at all times to minors and drunk- 
ards and to persons to whom the sellers have been 
requested to cease selling by their families or em- 
ployers. Are you executing that law ? The letting 
of real estate for the illicit selling of liquor is made 
more perilous by a new clause requiring the magistrate 
to serve notice of the conviction of any party of 
such an offence on the lessor of the premises. The 
latter is thereupon required, by the old law of com- 
mon nuisance, to eject the tenant, under penalty. 
Are church-members in Massachusetts who own real 
estate in degraded quarters never implicated in the 
violation of that righteous public law ? 

America wants her churches to organize themselves 
for permanent and aggressive, just as they occasion- 
ally have organized themselves for temporary and 
timid, work for the squalid and debased. I read in 
the newspapers the other day that some noble women, 
lineal descendants, no doubt, of those whom Paul 
saw on Mars Hill, or of those who were among the 
most efficient of all the powers that cowed old Rome 
by the purity of Christian life, have gone into the 
jaws and throat of despair in certain abandoned quar- 
ters of this city, and have found homes for degraded 
women, and taken the almost incredible word of hope 
to persons like some to whom our Lord himself 
spoke. This work is going on silently ; it must not 
be heralded. What is needed is that it should be 
made permanent. [Applause.] 



COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PEKSONAL. 225 

Lessing said, that by and by, when the world has 
found out what church does the most good, it will 
know in what church to believe. [Applause.] Show 
me the church that is willing to wash the feet of the 
degraded ; show me the church that goes about from 
house to house doing good; show me the church 
organized for permanent, aggressive, audacious, moral 
effort ; show me a church that has not lost her Mas- 
ter's whip of small cords, and I will show you the 
church, and the only church, that can save America 
when she has two hundred inhabitants to the square 
mile. [Applause.] 

There was in our Christian and Sanitary Commission 
in the civil war a great hint for our years of peace. 
The Sanitary Commission and the Christian Com- 
mission followed our armies like white angels ; and 
why should not the flight of these two ministering 
spirits be in some sense perpetuated in our great 
cities, which are. always battle-fields? One thousand 
years ago the Norsemen came up Boston Harbor in 
shallops, every one of which had on its sail a paint- 
ing of a cormorant raven, and at its prow a wolf's 
head. Bryant says the Norse pirates sailed up yon- 
der azure bay a thousand years ago. What I know 
is, that the Norse raven yet flies in America, and the 
Norse wolf yet howls. What I want to fly side by 
side with the raven, what I want to run side by side 
with the wolf, is organized, permanent, aggressive, 
audacious, deadly Christian effort. [Applause.] 

New England has seen lately some new indications 
that temperance discussion in the church will be. 



226 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

heard by the masses outside of it. Look at the Mer- 
rimack River and its cities, and notice what one man, 
Dr. Reynolds, has done there. You do not believe in 
all his methods, although experience is indorsing 
them significantly ? Very well : will you invent 
better ones? [Applause.] What are we about, 
when men, and some women, through the country, 
more rapidly than under the scythe of war, are fall- 
ing into their graves under the flame of these gross, 
consuming habits, that we do not turn all the moral 
power of the church, at least once a month in 
cities, on this conflagration ? We have power to put 
down by moral suasion a great amount of this evil, 
and our responsibility is proportionate to our power. 
Let moral suasion once have free course, and legal 
suasion will follow of the right sort. Whenever 
temperance has tried to fly on one wing, that is, 
either with legal suasion alone on the one hand, or 
with moral suasion alone on the other, her flight has 
been a sorry spiral. She never will ascend to God, 
or even make the circuit of the globe, until she 
strikes the air with majestic equal vans keeping 
rhythm with each other, moral suasion and legal 
suasion, acting side by side, to bear her on, and to 
winnow the earth of both the tempters and the 
temptable. 

Shrewd men ought to perceive that undefiled reli- 
gion in the heart is the only adequate dissuasive 
from Circe's cup at the lips. "To conquer," said 
Napoleon, "we must replace." To conquer unholy 
passion we must replace it by holy passion. Un- 



COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 227 

doubtedly a man may lose in the religious renova- 
tion of his nature his appetite for strong drink. It 
is, you say, a very vexed question, whether a con- 
verted man loses his appetite for liquor. Cases of 
deep inherited disease may be set aside as not under 
discussion here. Put this question on another plane 
of thought. Have you not known some men morally 
transfigured by the power of a supreme earthly affec- 
tion ? Have you not seen some father bereaved of a 
darling boy, and changed thereafter, to the finger- 
tips ? Have you not known often a great crisis in 
life to take a bad appetite out of a man, even when 
the crisis was merely secular ? There are some de- 
rangements infinitely more infamous than inherited 
appetites for strong drink ; but even these are often 
removed wholly by a holy love, filial, conjugal, or pa- 
ternal, if once the affection takes hold of the deepest 
inmost in the soul. Can you not believe, that, when 
God is loved supremely, there may come to a man 
such an awakening of the upper zones of his nature, 
that he shall no longer have an appetite for strong 
drink ? He, and only he, will be lifted above tempta- 
tion who falls in love with God with all his heart. 

THE LECTURE. 

The Russian poet Derzhavin has the honor of 
having written an ode, to the rhythm of which all 
cultivated circles have bowed down, from the Yellow 
Sea westward to the Pacific. The stanzas of it you 
may see to-day embroidered on silk in the palaces of 
the Emperors of Japan and China. You will find 



228 TKANSCENDENTALISM. 

the poem translated into Persian, into Arabic, into 
Greek, into Italian, into German ; and, when I open 
the most popular of our American anthologies, I find 
that the book closes with this Russian anthem : 

u O Thou Eternal One, whose presence bright 
All space doth occupy, all motion guide, 
Unchanged through Time's all-devastating flight! 
Thou only God ; there is no God beside ! 
Being above all beings ! Mighty One 
Whom none can comprehend and none explore, 
Who fill'st existence with thyself alone, 
Embracing all, supporting, ruling o'er, 
Being whom we call God, and know no more! 



God! thus alone my lowly thoughts can soar, 
Midst thy vast works admire, obey, adore; 
And when the tongue is eloquent no more, 
The soul shall speak in tears in of gratitude." 

Translation of Sir John Bowring. 

When a poem has the majestic fortune to be 
adopted as a household word of culture in twenty 
nations, we are scientifically justified in the conclu- 
sion that the deep instincts of the human heart from 
the rising to the setting sun assert what the poem 
expresses. Thus we judge in the case of the songs of 
love ; and so, I insist, we must judge in relation to the 
anthems of religion. Indeed, these latter sink more 
penetratingly into history than the former. Nothing 
is treasured by the best part of the world so pains- 
takingly, from the epic we call the Book of Job to 
Derzhavin's poem on the Divine Nature, as the litera- 
ture that is struck worthily to the keynote of ado- 



COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PEESONAL. 229 

ration of the Infinite Perfection of a Personal God. 
This is a literary fact which the Matthew Arnolds 
and Herbert Spencers would do well to fathom. The 
native human instincts are ascertainable by the re- 
ception all races and tribes and tongues give to the 
literature of communion with God as personal. Such 
instincts are a scientific proof of the existence of their 
correlate. There can be no thought without a 
thinker. There is thought in the universe; there- 
fore, there is a thinker in the universe. But a 
thinker is a person: therefore there is a Personal 
Thinker in the universe. There can be no such 
organic hungering as all nations have for communion 
with God as personal without the possibility of such 
communion. Men who revere the natural will not 
scorn Theism, for it is as natural as any thing else 
in nature. The veracity of our theistic instincts is 
proved by their naturalness. Julius Muller gives as 
one definition of religion the communion of the soul 
with God as personal. 

1. Men as they are can be made holy only by lov- 
ing a holy person. 

2. Nothing so effectually purifies the heart as love ; 
for nothing so effectually wooes us from selfishness. 

3. There can be no love without trust, and no 
trust without purity. 

4. Love produces in the lover the mood of the ob- 
ject loved. 

5. Souls grow more by contact with souls than by 
all other means. 

6. Growth, strength, bliss, arise naturally from 
spiritual love. 



230 TEANSCEKDENTALISM. 

7. All these laws of the higher affections apply to 
the communion of the human spirit with the Ineffa- 
ble Holy Person whom the moral law reveals. 

8. Under these irreversible natural laws, religion 
is affectionate communion with God as personal. 

In Locksley Hall, Tennyson, speaking merely as 
an observer of human nature in its social zone, utters 
one of the profoundest of all the truths of its reli- 
gious zone, when he says, 

" Love took up the harp of life; smote on all the chords with 

might ; 
Smote the chord of self, which, trembling, passed in music out 

of sight." 

Is there any hand but that of love that can pro- 
duce this effect ? Under natural law can man be 
made unselfish or holy in any other way than by loving 
a holy person ? Tennyson knows of no other way ; 
religious science knows of no other. 

The truth is, my friends, we are acquainted with 
no furnace which will burn selfishness out of a man, 
except this fiery bliss we call a supreme spiritual 
affection. There is admiration of men by each other ; 
but there is no burning the selfishness out of men 
until they come to trust and to love, and to that in- 
tersphering of soul by soul which is always the re- 
sult of trust of the transfigured sort, — one of the 
rarest things on earth. Do not think that I am put- 
ting before you a low ideal of trust ; for I speak of 
those forms of love — conjugal, filial, paternal — 
which the poets love to glorify. 



COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 231 

I read the other day two Boston sonnets entitled 
" Trust," which made of the crystalline window of 
one of the deepest human experiences an opening 
through which to look into the sky behind the sky. 

I know that thou art true and strong and pure. 

My forehead on thy palm, I fall asleep : 

My sentinels with thee no vigils keep, 
Though elsewhere never without watch secure. 
How restful is thy palm ! I life endure : 

These stranger souls whose veils I shyly sweep, 

These doubts what secrets hide within the deep, 
Because, aglow within the vast obscure, 

Thy hand is whitest light ! My peace art thou; 

My firm green isle within a troubled sea; 

And, lying here, and looking upward now, 
I ask, if thou art this, what God must be: 

If thus I rest within thy goodness, how 

In goodness of the infinite degree? 

But there are lightnings wherever there is love ; 
for character cannot have one side without having 
two sides ; we cannot love good, and not abhor evil ; 
and so the second sonnet, equally true to trust, con- 
trasts with the first : 

This crystal soul of thine, were it outspread 
Until the drop should fill the universe, 
How in it might the angels' wings immerse; 

And wake and sleep the living and the dead ; 

Bereaved eyes bathe ; rest Doubt its tossing head ; 
Swim the vast worlds; dissolve Guilt's icy curse; 
And sightless, if bat loyal, each disperse 

Fear by full trust, and, by devotion, dread! 

And yet these perfect eyes in which mine sleep 
Would not be sweet were not their lightning deep. 



232 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

In softest skies the swiftest fire-bolts dwell. 
Thine eyes mix dew and flame, and both are well. 
If thus I fear this soul, God ! how thee, 
Both love's and lightning's full infinity? 

[Applause.] 

In the Portuguese Sonnets, the most subtle and 
tender and sublime expressions of affection ever 
written by woman, it is not so much Mrs. Browning 
who sings, as Robert Browning, the future husband. 
When Tennyson, in the In Memoriam commemo- 
rates the young Hallam, it is not Tennyson who 
sings, so much as Hallam. When Robert Hall and 
Canning form a friendship for each other at Eton, 
it is Canning who appears in Hall, and Hall who 
appears in Canning. When Thomas Carlyle, John 
Sterling, and Edward Irving, are friends, it is Irving 
that appears in Carlyle at times, and Carlyle that 
appears in Irving ; and, when Sterling lies dying, it 
is Carlyle that makes up more than half his soul. 
Always when two human personalities are united by 
a supreme spiritual affection, they intersphere each 
other, and produce the moods of one in the other ; 
and, when there is a transfiguration in personal 
affection, there is thus a smiting of the chord of self, 
till it passes in music out of sight. Of course, there- 
fore, there is no method to produce growth, strength, 
and bliss in the soul, like the pure contact of spirit 
with spirit. Carlyle says we grow more by contact 
of soul with soul than by all other means united. 
Literature, if possessed of power, is the mirror of 
soul, and causes those who love it to grow by contact 
with the pulsating, reflected depths of genius. 



coMMxnsnoN with god as personal. 233 

But a Persian proverb says, " Look into the sky 
to find the moon, and not into the pool." Look into 
the faces of your elect living friends, and into the 
souls of those whom you trust most. Make much 
of your giant friendships of all kinds, and be thank- 
ful if you have one genuine friendship of any kind, 
and let unforced trust enswathe you, if you would 
be transfigured. You grow more in these high 
moments of personal affection when you look at the 
moon in the sky than by much meditating on the 
moon in the pool. Friendships with authors and 
heroes in a far past are undoubtedly honorable to 
us, and transfiguring, and in loneliness are, perhaps, 
the highest human solace ; but they are not the 
highest possible to man ; they are not the moon in 
the sky. 

Gentlemen, you all foresee that I am to affirm that 
a human spirit may commune with the Infinite 
Spirit, and that all these laws of transfiguration are 
to be kept in view when we would explain the 
renovating power on man of the communion of the 
soul with God as personal. You anticipate that in 
a moment I shall be asking, in the name of the 
scientific method, that you, face to face with the 
Holy Person the conscience reveals, should give free 
course to all those majestic natural laws by which 
soul transfigures soul through personal affection. 
Gentlemen, I do ask this, and in the stern name of 
the scientific method. Is any one thinking, that, as 
a benighted soul, brought up in the mossy mediseval- 
ism of our latest theology, I cannot worship one 



234 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

God, because I believe in three Gods ? Do not pity 
medievalism too much ; it knows the difference 
between Trinity and Tritheism. I wish just now to 
thank God, if you can worship one God as Derzhavin 
does. I rejoice with you, if you can go as far as 
scientific Theism does, and worship one God, who 
was, who is, who is to come. Let us to-day not go 
farther than with Derzhavin to admire, obey, adore 
One King, eternal, immortal, invisible, and in con- 
science spiritually tangible. 

Samuel Johnson, when he had finished his great 
dictionary, received a note from his publisher in these 
words : " Andrew Miller sends his compliments to 
Samuel Johnson, with the money in payment for the 
last sheet of his dictionary, and thanks God he is 
done with him." To this rude note Johnson replied, 
" Samuel Johnson sends his compliments to Andrew 
Miller, and is very glad to notice, as he does by his 
note, that Andrew Miller has the grace to thank 
God for any thing." [Applause.] You call your- 
selves deists ; you call yourselves theists ; you hold, 
that, in the name of science, we can worship one 
God, who must be behind all natural law. I thank 
God that you believe as much as that. Perhaps 
more lies wrapped up and capsulate in your belief 
than you think. Here are a few slight notes from 
a Boston marching-song, on which my eyes fell the 
other day, when I was alone. They are sung in 
the name of exact science ; and surely we can sing 
together any thing attuned to that key-note. 



COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 235 

Bounds of sun-groups none can see; 
Worlds God droppeth on his knee ; 
Galaxies that loftiest swarm, 
Float before a loftier Form. 

Mighty the speed of suns and worlds; 
Mightier who these onward hurls ; 
Pure the conscience's fiery bath ; 
Purer fire God's lightning hath. 

Brighter He who maketh bright 
Jasper, beryl, chrysolite; 
Lucent more than they whose hands 
Girded up Orion's bands. 

Sweet the spring, but sweeter still 
He who doth its censers fill ; 
Good is love, but better who 
Giveth love its power to woo. 

Lo, the Maker! greater He, 
Better, than His works must be: 
Of the works the lowest stair 
Thought can scale, but fainteth there. 

Thee with all our strength and heart, 
God, we love for what Thou art; 
Bavished we, obedient now, 
Only, only perfect Thou! 

[Applause.] 

Will you sing that tremorless* song of science, and 
keep entranced, stalwart step to your singing, and 
then turn to me and say that these sublime natural 
principles by which human affection transfigures the 



236 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

soul do not apply in the sphere of man's relations to 
the Ineffable Holy Person the moral law reveals? 
There is such a law ; there is such a person. It fol- 
lows that there are relations between that holy per- 
son and ourselves. In the name of ascertained natural 
law, I affirm that men as they are can be made holy 
only by loving a holy person. [Applause.] In the 
religious as well as in the social zone of our faculties, . 
only love can smite all the chords with might, or 
smite the chord of self into invisibility and music. 
But the love which can do this is not admiration only ; 
it is adoration. 

Theodore Parker's absolute religion fails to dis- 
tinguish properly between the admiration and the adora- 
tion of the Ineffable Holy Person which Parker admits 
that the moral law reveals. 

1. Admiration does not always imply a full and 
vivid view of the Infinite Holiness of the Infinite 
Oughtness revealed by the moral law. Adoration 
always does imply this. 

2. Admiration does not always imply a glad self- 
commitment of the soul to the Infinite Holiness. 
Adoration always does. 

3. Admiration usually has but a fragmentary view 
of the Divine attributes as revealed in the nature of 
things. Adoration has, or is willing to have, a full 
view. 

4. Admiration may give pleasure for a time. Ado- 
ration gives bliss. 

5. Admiration may have delight in only a few of 



COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PEKSONAL. 237 

God's attributes. Adoration is supreme delight in 
all God's attributes. 

6. Admiration of God is often all that is found, or 
all that it is thought necessary to require, in the dis- 
tinctively literary or poetic schemes of sceptical reli- 
gious thought. Adoration, however, and jiot merely 
admiration, of an Infinitely Holy Person revealed by 
the moral law, is scientifically known to be necessary 
to the peace of the soul with the nature of things. 

What are the signs of this error in Parker's writ- 
ings ? 

1. Theodore Parker made only a fragmentary use 
of the intuitions or self-evident truths of the soul. 

2. Hence his view of that portion of the divine 
nature which may be known to man was fragmen- 
tary. 

3. The inadequate emphasis he laid on the fact of 
sin shows how fragmentary this view was. 

4. Parker's fragmentary view of the Divine nature 
is shown in his constant undervaluing of the nature 
of things as it is faithfully represented in the Old 
Testament. 

Goethe's literary insight, you will probably think, 
was quite as keen as Matthew Arnold's is ; and he, 
long before Arnold, applied purely literary tests to the 
Hebrew Scriptures, as religious science herself has 
been doing for a hundred years. The Old Testament 
is not sterner than the nature of things. It is amazing 
that Matthew Arnold believes his famous literary 
test to be a new one. Goethe said, and Parker used 



238 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

in his earlier career to quote the words admiringly, 
" The Hebrew Scriptures stand so happily combined 
together, that, even out of the most diverse elements, 
the feeling of a whole still rises before us. They are 
complete enough to satisfy, fragmentary enough to 
excite, barbarous enough to arouse, tender enough to 
appease." (See Frothingham's Parker, p. 56.) 

The Old Testament Scriptures out of date ? Not 
till the nature of things is ! [Applause.] I rode once 
from a noon on the Dead Sea, through moonlight on 
the Mar Saba gorges, to Bethlehem in the morning 
light. I passed through the scenes in which many 
of David's psalms had their origin, so far as human 
causes brought them into existence. On horseback 
I climbed slowly and painfully out of that scorched, 
ghastly hollow in which the Salt Lake lies. I found 
myself, as I ascended, passing through a gnarled, 
smitten, volcanic region, and often at the edge or in 
the depth of ravines deeper than that eloquent shaft 
yonder on Bunker Hill is high. At a place where, no 
doubt, David had often searched for his flocks, I 
found the famous convent of Mar Saba clinging to 
the side of its stupendous ravine, and I lay down 
there and slept until the same sun rose which David 
saw. I looked northward from above Mar Saba, and 
saw Jerusalem above me yet to the north ; for I had 
been ascending from a spot greatly below the level 
of the Mediterranean. As I drew near Bethlehem, 
through brown wheat-fields in which a woman called 
Ruth once gleaned, I opened and read the book which 
will bear her name yet to thousands of years to come. 



COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 239 

Johnson, you remember, once read that book in Lon- 
don, and moved a parlor full of people to tears by it, 
and to curiosity enough to ask who was the author 
of that beautiful pastoral. In my saddle there in 
Syria I was moved as Johnson's hearers were in 
London ; but when I opened the Psalms, one by one, 
and looked back over the ravines toward the Dead 
Sea, and northward toward Jerusalem, and upon the 
hill of Bethlehem, to which all nations after a gaze 
of nineteen hundred years in duration, were looking 
yet, and at that season sending pilgrims ; when I 
remembered how that terraced hill of olive-gardens 
had influenced human history as no other spot on the 
globe has done, and that in God's government of this 
planet there are no accidents ; when I took up the 
astounding harp of Isaiah, and turned through the 
list of the prophets to find mysterious passage after 
passage predicting what would come and what has 
come ; and when I thought of those critics under the 
western sky who would saw asunder the Old Testa- 
ment and the New, and put into the shade those 
Scriptures which Goethe calls a unit in themselves, 
and which are doubly a unit when united with the 
New Testament, I remembered Him who, on the 
way to Emmaus, opened the Old Testament Scrip- 
tures, and with them made men's hearts burn. 
[Applause.] 

Grpd and the nature of things have no cross-purposes. 
Truth works well, and what works well is truth. 

If we are out of harmony with the nature of things, 
we may be scientifically certain that we are out of 
harmony with God. 



240 TBANSCENDENTALISM. 

Only a religion consisting of delight in all God's 
attributes, or adoration of the whole nature of things 
as representative of the Divine Nature, can satisfy 
the demands of self-evident truth. 

With multitudes of other careless students of the 
nature of things, Theodore Parker taught the admi- 
ration rather than the adoration of God. 

I do not forget those prayers of this man, which 
seem to ascend always as into a dateless noon of 
mercy, and I do not deny the existence of that date- 
less noon ; but, even if I were to forget, uncounted 
ages would yet remember that the prayers which 
caused great drops of blood to fall down to the 
ground were not quite in that mood, and that no 
doubt He who offered them knew the full reach of 
the Divine Mercy, and that it would go as far as the 
Divine Justice can, but that there are moral impossi- 
bilities to a Holy Being. 

My friends, you may do as you please ; but I, for 
one, will not take my leap into the Unseen Holy 
without looking for the truth around the whole hori- 
zon of inquiry ; and I find that the most sceptical of 
you are agreed that there is a stern and an infinitely 
tender nature of things ; and that, even if God exists 
not, you must be reconciled with the nature of things ; 
and that, if God exists, you must yet be reconciled 
with it, for God himself has no cross-purposes with 
it. 

If a vivid view of the nature of things produced 
this bloody sweat, perhaps you and I ought not to 
dream through life, thinking that every fall is a fall 



COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 241 

upward, and that it can never be too late to mend. 
All history proves that such a faith does not work well. 
A faith that does not work well is scientifically 
known to be out of harmony with natural law. 

What effect arises by natural law in the soul when a 
man is brought to a vivid sense of the nearness of the 
Holy Person the moral law reveals ? This question I, 
for one, am anxious should be investigated in the 
light of exact research ; for the use of the scientific 
method in answering this inquiry opens the door to 
the proof that Christianity is the religion of science. 

1. The more a man has of the religion demanded 
by the nature of things, that is, the more adoration 
he has of the Infinite Holiness of the Infinite Ought- 
ness revealed by the moral law, the more he is 
thrown into silence as to his own righteousness, into 
self-condemnation, and into unrest and fear as to the 
future effect of his past sins. 

Gentlemen, I affirm that this is a fair rendering of 
the history of the human heart age after age. When 
a man comes near to God, his mood is not that 
of self-justification. Wait until eternity breathes on 
your cheek, wait until you come face to face with 
Somewhat in conscience that Shakspeare says makes 
cowards of us all, and then ask whether the Infinite 
Holiness of the moral law will be altogether satis- 
factory to you. Put the question here and now, 
whether we, in our characters as they stand at this 
moment, should be happy if we were in heaven with 
our characters unchanged. Whitefield asked that 
question on Boston Common yonder in 1740. It has 



242 TEANSCENDENTAUSM. 

been asked in every century for eighteen hundred 
years, and now is asked by science ; and every one in 
his senses, when listening to the still small voice, 
has said, " As for me, I am the son of a man of un- 
clean lips, and I am a man of unclean lips, and in my 
own righteousness I cannot stand alone before God." 
What are we to make of this action of human nature ? 
It is a fact, and it is an immeasurably significant fact. 
That is the way of history ; and I defy any man to 
show that I am not true to the unforced outcome of 
human nature outside of all the creeds, when I say 
that a view of all God's attributes humiliates man, 
puts him out of conceit with his own righteousness, 
and brings him more and more, even after he has 
reformed, into fear lest it may not be well with him, 
because there is a past behind him which ought to be 
covered. We are made so ; and, when a religion will 
not work well in those deep hours in which we see 
the structure of our own souls, I am afraid to take it 
in my lighter hours. Addison said that a religion 
should work well in three places, if it is good for 
any thing, on death-beds, in our highest moments 
of emotional illumination, and when we are keenest 
rationally. A religion does not work well anywhere 
unless in all these three places. Take your scheme 
of thought that assumes that it is never too late to 
mend, or that every fall is a fall upward, and bring 
it face to face with these deepest expressions of 
human nature, age after age. Does it work well 
there in these deepest moments ? If I find, that, age 
after age, a scheme of thought is not likely to make 



i 



COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PEESONAL. 243 

men better, is not improving society, is not taking 
hold of bad lives and making them good, that is for 
me a sufficient proof that it is out of harmony with 
natural law. If, in the long course of experience, a 
scheme of thought does not make me better, does 
not put a bridle upon passion, does not lift me into 
harmony with all the divine attributes, I know from 
that fact scientifically that it is out of harmony with 
the Infinite Oughtness which stands behind the 
moral law. [Applause.] 

2. The only conception of God's character given 
under heaven or among men, by which a man who 
worships all God's attributes can be at peace, is 
Christ's conception. 

3. The superiority of Christianity to all schemes 
of natural religion is, that it presents the idea of 
God as an Incarnate God and as an Atoning God, 
and of personal love to that Person as the means of 
the purification of the world. 

Christianity does not teach that personal demerit 
is taken off from us, and put upon our Lord. Such 
transference is an impossibility in the nature of 
things. But I hold that Christianity, with the Atone- 
ment as its central truth, matches the nature of 
tilings, and turns exactly in the wards of the human 
soul. It has, as a theory of religious truth, a scien- 
tific beauty absolutely beyond all comment. The 
returned deserter, knowing his own permanent and 
unremovable personal demerit, may yet be allowed 
to escape the penalty of the law by the substitution 
of the king's chastisement for the deserter's punish- 



244 TBANSCEKDENTALISM. 

ment ; and then that deserter, looking on his king as 
both his Saviour and Lord, needs no other motive to 
loyalty than the memory of his unspeakable conde- 
scension, justice, and love. That memory gives rise 
to adoration. Whether or not this scheme of thought 
be the correct one, I am not asking you now to deter- 
mine ; but certainly it is the most moving, the most 
natural, and the most qualified to regenerate human 
nature, of all the schemes the world has seen. I 
speak of it here and now only as an intellectual sys- 
tem, and affirm, in the name o£ the cool precision of 
the scientific method, that Christianity, and it only, as 
a scheme of thought, shows how man may look on all 
God's attributes, and be at peace. It and it only pro- 
vides for our deliverance from both the love of sin and 
the guilt of sin. Merely as a school of ideas adapted 
to the soul's inmost wants, Christianity is as much 
above all other philosophy in merit as the noon is 
more radiant than a rushlight. " The cross," said a 
successor of Theodore Parker to me the other day, 
" is full of the nature of things." God be praised 
that this incisively scientific sentence has come from 
the lips of a successor of Theodore Parker ! " The 
cross is not an after-thought." We are to love a 
God who from eternity to eternity is our Redeemer ; 
and, looking on him as such, we are to take him affec- 
tionately as both Saviour and Lord. Christianity 
includes all ethics ; it teaches adoration before all 
the divine attributes ; it is a philosophy ; it is an 
art ; it is a growth ; and it is also a revelation of the 
nature of things which has no variableness nor shad- 



COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PEESONAL. 245 

ow of turning. But its central thought is that of a 
Holy Person revealed by the moral law, and at once 
Redeemer and Lord, and of love for that Person as 
the means, and the only possible effective means, for 
the purification of the world. God as an atoning 
God, God as revealed in history, the Cross full of the 
nature of things, the personal love of Infinite Perfec- 
tion as a regenerating bath, this is the beautiful and 
awful which has triumphed, and will continue to tri- 
umph. [Applause.] 



THE TEINITY AND TEITHEISM. 

THE SIXTY-EIGHTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC- 
TURESHIP, IN TREMONT TEMPLE MARCH 6. 



"ovk Ixu Trpooeucaoai, 

ttcivt' emvTadfiufiEvoc, 
iti&iv Aibg, el to fidrav una Qpovridog axOof 

XPV (BaXslV £T7}TV[lU>g. 

oi»J' bang itapoiOev tjv fieyag, 
"Kanfiaxy Opaaei ftpvuv, 
ovdev av te^ai irplv on>, 
bg 6' eirecr' Z$v, rpia- 

KTTJpog OlXETll TVX6)V." 

^IscHYiiUs: Agamemnon, 163-171. 



" Sinrnl quoque cum beatis videamus 
Glorianter vultum Tuum, Christe Dens, 
Gaudium quod est immensum atque protmm, 
Ssecula per infinita saeculorum." 

Rhythm. Eccl. 



THE TRINITY AND TRITHEISM. 

PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. 

Civtl-ser vice reform is to-day to be nominally, 
and perhaps really, crowned in Washington. Both 
political parties have demanded on paper the reforma- 
tion of our system of giving all political spoils to 
political victors ; and that reformation we can now 
have, if Congress and the people are agreed. The 
executive and legislative powers and popular senti- 
ment once united, any reform can be carried in the 
United States. If signs commonly thought sure do 
not mislead, it may be asserted that popular senti- 
ment and the Executive are now united in favor of 
what is known as civil-service reform. This is the 
best news since Gettysburg. The question now is, 
whether the upper and nether mill-stones of execu- 
tive and popular power can grind to pieces any self- 
ish or obtuse opposition in Congress, or among the 
placemen of party to this righteous and momentous 
cause. In expressing a hope that we may return 

249 



250 TEANSCENDENTALISM. 

from the Jacksonian to the Jeffersonian and Wash- 
ingtonian policy in regard to onr civil service, I shall 
offend no man's prejudices. I assume that every one 
who is disappointed in the result of the presiden- 
tial contest would be sincerely glad to have all that 
was promised in the Democratic platform carried out 
in our politics. I shall also assume, with equal 
audacity, that every member of the political party 
now in power holds sincerely the propositions an- 
nounced in the letter of acceptance of him who is 
to-day inaugurated as the President of a people who 
will number fifty millions before his term of office 
expires. 

Scholars in politics assuredly are agreed that re- 
sistance to the crescent and now haughty evils which 
have arisen from the application of Jacksonian 
principles to our national politics cannot be made too 
swift and decisive. I do not couple Jefferson's name 
with Jackson's ; for the truth is, that we are now 
beginning to go back from the democracy of Jack- 
son to that of Jefferson. The action of the latter, 
so far as the civil service is concerned, was one with 
the practice of Washington and Adams, Madison 
and Monroe. Never forget, what cannot be too 
often repeated, that "Washington, in all the eight 
years of his administration, removed only nine men 
from office ; Adams, only nine ; Jefferson, thirty- 
nine, but none for political reasons ; Madison, nine ; 
Monroe, five ; John Quincy Adams, two ; Jackson, 
according to his opponents, two thousand, and, 
according to his own admission, six hundred and 



THE TKCSITY A2TO TRITHEISM. 251 

ninety. (See Greg, Hocks Ahead, Appendix on 
American Politics.') 

Some of us younger men, who never saw in use in 
the civil service any other than our present spoils 
system, think that the arrangement by which all 
political spoils are to be given to political victors is 
a natural law, and originated in that time when the 
morning stars sang together — not for joy. My 
State of New York, empire in both commerce and 
iniquity, — God save her ! — saw the origination of 
the spoils system in the factious quarrels between 
the ins and outs among the Clintons and Livingstons, 
from 1800 to 1830. Sitting over the mahogany of 
their dinner-tables, these great aristocratic families of 
the Hudson distributed offices among their adher- 
ents according to the principle that to party victors 
belong party spoils. Rotation in office began to be 
practised in New York and Pennsylvania near the 
beginning of the century. It was Jan. 24, 1832, 
when Marcy, making a speech in the Senate in favor 
of sending Van Buren to England as an ambassador, 
first defended in Congress the principle that to po- 
litical victors belong political spoils. It was Aaron 
Burr himself, who, in 1815, writing a letter to his 
son-in-law, Allston of South Carolina, first suggested 
for President Andrew Jackson, — one of the bravest, 
but not one of the broadest, men the world ever 
saw. No doubt, if Jackson were alive to-day, he 
would be among the first to seize by the throat the 
serpent which came out of the egg which was hatched 
in our national politics in his administration, although 



252 teanscendentalism. 

laid first in New- York State. Civil-service reform 
takes patronage from party, and gives it to the people. 
It was between 1830 and 1840 that the initiative of 
the people died out in our national politics. While 
we were busy with an opening West and with an- 
thracite coal and railways, and modern political news- 
papers, and the electric telegraph, and California, the 
spoils system grew up. An astounding civil war 
drew on apace. We had no time to study minor 
dangers ; it was necessary to make Congress strong. 

In our first centennial year we had eighty thou- 
sand, and, before a second or third centennial, we 
shall probably have two hundred thousand or three 
hundred thousand civil-service offices. Are we to 
follow the spoils system, and turn out or put in that 
number of partisan placemen with every change of 
administration? If so, we shall do well to remem- 
ber Macaulay's predictions, that, when the United 
States have a population of two hundred to the 
square mile, the Jeffersonian parts of our polity will 
produce fatal effects. If you think the Jeffersonian 
will not, ask yourself, face to face with recent events, 
whether the Jacksonian will. Massachusetts has not 
yet a population of two hundred to the square mile. 
But what if the whole land were as thickly settled 
as Massachusetts, and we were to manage every thing 
as now, by the Jacksonian rule, that to political vic- 
tors belong all political spoils ? 

Twice our land has been washed in blood in the 
first hundred years of its history ; and yet, after that 
washing, Lowell calls America the land of broken 



THE TRINITY AND TBITHE1SM. 253 

promise. There is not on the globe a more patriotic 
poet than he ; and you may count the graves of his 
relatives who fell in the civil war, if you will go 
yonder to the eloquent sods the spring is Idssing in 
Mount Auburn. Your Lowell says, and the poem is 
fit to be read in Boston on this inauguration noon : 

" The world turns mild. Democracy, they say, 
Rounds the sharp knobs of character away. 
The Ten Commandments had a meaning once, 
Felt in their bones by least considerate men, 
Because behind them public conscience stood, 
And without wincing made their mandates good. 
But now that statesmanship is just a way 
To dodge the primal curse, and make it pay, 
Since office means a kind of patent drill 
To force an entrance to the nation's till; 
And peculation something rather less 
Risky than if you spelt it with an S, 
Now that to steal by law is grown an art, 
Whom rogues the sires, their milder sons call smart." 

Tempora Mutantur. 
[Applause.] 

Remembering that this President who is inaugu- 
rated to-day went into the civil war, and brought 
back alive only a third of the officers who enlisted 
under him; remembering that he, at least, has not 
corruptly or even anxiously sought his present high 
position, however much there may have been of 
greed and fraud behind him in the organization that 
has elected him ; remembering that he has a charac- 
ter, a new thing, rather, in high places; remem- 
bering that he left Ohio as Lincoln did Illinois, 



254 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

asking the prayers of all men that the Eternal 
Providence might watch over his course ; remember- 
ing that there are things in our land which war 
could not settle, and which only wise, victorious, 
patient politics can arrange in a manner to satisfy 
North and South, East and West alike ; remember- 
ing especially that this party which the present 
Chief Magistrate represents has been sixteen years 
in power, and therefore has presumably had a great 
deal of temptation [applause], shall we not unite, 
not only our prayer, but our watching, and send 
a keen atmosphere of both from the four winds, to 
breathe on our legislative power, till the civil-ser- 
vice practice of Washington and Jefferson shall start 
up as a flame from its dying embers, and, fed by the 
colossal fuel of our new political conditions, become 
once more the light and the glad fireside of the land ; 
and Macaulay and observant Europe, as they gaze 
into our future, can have on this point no more 
ground for fear ? [Applause.] 

THE LECTURE. 

There is a dim twilight of religious experience in 
which the soul easily mistakes Ossa and Parnassus 
for Sinai and Calvary. My feeling is, that orthodoxy 
itself lives much of the time in this undispersed twi- 
light; and that the unscientific and lawless liberal- 
ism of many half-educated people who have lost the 
Master's whip of small cords, believe in aesthetic, but 
not in moral law, and proclaim, that, in the last analy- 
sis, there is in this universe nothing to be feared (Dr. 



THE TKLNTTY AKD TEITHEISM. 255 

Bartol says so), and therefore, we must add, nothing 
to be loved! — is always in an earlier and deeper 
shadow of that misleading haze. The gray, brindled 
dawn is better than night; but the risen sun is 
better than the gray, brindled dawn. We must 
startle mere sesthetics and literary religiosity out of 
its dream that it is religion, by exhibiting before it 
the difference between the admiration and the adora- 
tion of the attributes of the Holy Person the moral 
law reveals. If any who are orthodox in their 
thoughts worship in their imagination three different 
beings, they, too, must be startled from this remnant 
of Paganism by a stern use of the scientific method. 

As Carlyle says of America, so I of this hushed, 
reverent discussion, — do not judge of the structure 
while the scaffolding is up. A glimpse only of the 
opening of the unfathomable theme which the dis- 
tinction between the Tri-unity of the Divine Nature 
and Tri theism suggests can be given here and now; 
and more than this will be expected by no scholar. 
Reserving qualifications for later occasions, I pur- 
posely present to-day only an outline unobscured by 
detail. I know what I venture in definition and 
illustration; but I am asking no one to take my 
opinions. Nevertheless, in order yet further to save 
time, I am to cast myself abruptly into the heart 
of this topic, and to give you personal conviction. 
After all, that is what serious men want from each 
other ; and the utterance of it is not egotism in you 
or in me. It is the shortest way of coming at men's 
hearts, and it is sometimes the shortest way in 



256 TEANSCENDENTALISM. 

which to come at men's heads, to tell what you per- 
sonally are willing to take the leap into the Unseen, 
depending upon. 

What is the definition of the Trinity ? 

1. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are 
one and only one God. 

2. Each has a peculiarity incommunicable to the 
others. 

3. Neither is God without the others. 

4. Each, with the others, is God. 

That I suppose to be the standard definition ; and, 
if you will examine it, you will find it describing 
neither three separate individualities, nor yet three 
mere modes of manifestation; that is, neither tri- 
theism nor modalism. In God are not three wills, 
three consciences, three intellects, three sets of affec- 
tions. The first of all the religious truths of exact 
research is that the Lord our God is one God. It is 
the immemorial doctrine of the Christian ages, that 
there are not three Gods, but only one God (Athana- 
sian Creed). He is one substance, and in that one 
substance are three subsistences ; but the subsistences 
are not individualities. All the great symbols teach 
decisively that we must not unify the subsistences ; 
but with equal decisiveness they affirm that we must 
not divide the substance. In our present low estate 
as human, we find by the experience of centuries 
that we do well to heed both these injunctions, and 
to look on the Divine Nature on all the sides on 
which it has revealed itself, if we would not fall into 
the narrowness of materialism on the one hand, or 






L 



THE TRINITY AND TEITHEISM. 257 

into the vague ways of tritheism or pantheism on the 
other. 

How shall we make clear in our intellectual and 
emotional experiences the truth of the Trinity, and at 
the same time keep ourselves in the attitude of those 
who worship one God, and who therefore do not 
break, or wish to break, with science, and yet in the 
position of those who, in the one substance, worship 
three subsistencies, and therefore do not break, or 
wish to break, with the very significant record of the 
most fruitful portion of the church through eighteen 
hundred years ? For one, accepting the definition 
of the Trinity which I have now given as neither 
tritheistic nor modalistic, — if the learned men here will 
allow me for once to use technical language, — I per- 
sonally find no difficulty in this doctrine in the shape 
of self-contradiction in either thought or terms ; and 
I find infinite advantages in it when I wish to con- 
join biblical and scientific truth as a transfiguration 
for life. 

It is sometimes despairingly said, that the doctrine 
of the Trinity cannot be illustrated ; and this is true. 
It is the proverb of philosophy, that no comparison 
walks on four feet ; and what I am about to say you 
will take as intended by me to exhibit only the par- 
allelisms which I point out. I am responsible for no 
unmentioned point in a comparison. No doubt you 
can find as many places where the illustration I am 
to use will not agree with the definition as I can 
places where it does agree. Nevertheless, after dwell- 
ing on perhaps a hundred other illustrations, my own 



258 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

thoughts oftenest, and with most of reverence, come 
back to this. 

Take the mysterious, palpitating radiance which 
at this instant streams through the solar windows of 
this Temple, and may we not say, for the sake of illus- 
tration, that it is one substance ? Can you not affirm, 
however, that there are in it three subsistencies ? 
It would be possible for me, by a prism here, to pro- 
duce the seven colors on a screen yonder. I should 
have color there, and heat here, and there would 
be luminousness everywhere. But in color is a 
property incommunicable to mere luminousness or 
to heat. In luminousness is a property incommuni- 
cable to mere heat or to color. In heat is a property 
incommunicable to mere color or to luminousness. 
These three — luminousness, color, heat — are, how- 
ever, one solar radiance. Heat subsists in the solar 
radiance, and color subsists in the solar radiance, and 
light subsists in the solar radiance. The three are 
one ; but they are not one in the same sense in which 
they are three. 

It is one of the inexcusable mistakes of a silly 
kind of scepticism, which no one here holds, that 
there are in the Trinity three persons in the literal 
or colloquial sense of that word. Sometimes with 
tears, and sometimes with laughter, one pauses over 
this astounding passage, printed in his manhood by 
Thomas Paine, in his Age of Reason ; and yet what 
he heard read was, I presume, an atrociously careless 
orthodox discussion. 



. 



THE TRINITY AND TKTTHEISM. 259 

" I well remember, when about seven or eight years of age, 
hearing a sermon read by a relation of mine, who was a great 
devotee of the church, upon the subject of what is called redemp- 
tion by the death of the Son of God. After the sermon was ended, 
I went into the garden ; and, as I was going down the garden-steps 
(for I perfectly recollect the spot), I revolted at the recollection 
of what I had heard, and thought to myself that it was making 
God Almighty act like a passionate man that killed his son 
when he could not revenge himself any other way ; and, as I was 
sure a man would be hanged that did such a thing, I could not 
see for what purpose they preached such sermons. This was 
not one of those kind of thoughts that had any thing in it of child- 
ish levity: it was to me a serious reflection, arising from the idea 
I had, that God was too good to do such an action, and also too 
almighty to be under any necessity of doing it. I believe in 
the same manner at this moment. . . . The Christian mytholo- 
gy has five deities ; there is God the Father," God the Son, God 
the Holy Ghost, the God Providence, and the Goddess Nature. 
But the Christian story of God the Father putting his Son to 
death, or employing people to do it (for that is the plain language 
of the story) , cannot be told by a parent to a child ; and to tell 
him that it was done to make mankind happier and better is 
making the story still worse, as if mankind could be improved 
by the example of murder " {Age of Reason, part i.). 

There is nothing in Paine's Age of Reason 
worth glancing at now, except this curious paragraph, 
in which he details the circumstances of the life-long 
unconscious obtuseness and ignorance out of which 
arose his opposition to Christianity. Possibly, if he 
had understood the distinction between the Trinity 
in God's nature and tritheism, this sharp and crac- 
kling pamphleteer for freedom, in spite of his narrow 
brow and coarse fibre, would not have fallen into this 
amazing error, which, according to his own account, 



260 TKANSCEKDENTALISM. 

underlay all his subsequent career as an infidel. 
Three separate beings, he thought, Christianity 
teaches us to believe exist in one God, and one 
enraged person of these three had murdered another 
person. 

But scholars as a mass, following St. -Augustine, 
centuries before poor Paine's day, copiously affirmed 
that the word person in the discussion of the 
Trinity does not mean what it does in colloquial 
speech. The word in its technical use is fifteen hun- 
dred years old ; and it means in that use now what 
it meant at first. 

How commonplace is St. Augustine's remark, 
repeated by Calvin, that this term was adopted 
because of the poverty of the Latin tongue ! Every- 
body of authority tells us, if you care for scholarly 
statement, that three persons never meant, in the 
standard discussions of this truth, three personalities ; 
for these would be three Gods. This Latin word 
persons is incalculably misleading in popular use on 
this theme. For one, I never employ it, although 
willing to use it if it is understood as it was by 
those who invented the term. Let us use Archbishop 
Whateley's word " subsistence ; " for that is the 
equivalent of the carefully-chosen, sharply-cut, Greek 
term " hypostasis " (Note to Whateley's Treatise 
on Logic). We had better say there are in one sub- 
stance three subsistences, and not mislead our gen- 
eration, with its heads in newspapers and ledgers, by 
using a phrase that was meant to be current only 
among scholars. All these scholars will tell you 



. 



THE TELNTTY AND TKITHEISM. 261 

that it is no evasion of the difficulties of this theme 
for me to throw out of this discussion at once the 
word persons as misleading ; for that word had 
originally no such meaning in the Latin tongue as 
the word person has in our own. Cicero says, Ego 
unus, sustineo tres personas : I, being one, sustain 
three characters, — my own, that of my client, and 
that of the judge. Our English language at this 
point is, as the Latin was not, rich enough to match 
the old Greek. With Liddon's Bampton Lectures on 
" The Divinity of our Lord," the best English book 
on this theme, though not exhaustive of it, let us say, 
" One substance and three subsistences," and thus 
go back to the Greek phrase, and be clear. 

Can the four propositions of the definition I have 
given be paralleled by an illustration ? 

1. Sunlight, the rainbow, and the heat of sunlight, 
are one solar radiance. 

2. Each has a peculiarity incommunicable to the 
others. 

3. Neither is full solar radiance without the others. 

4. Each with the others is such solar radiance. 
Sunlight, rainbow, heat, one solar radiance; Fa- 
ther, Son, Holy Ghost, one God ! 

1. As the rainbow shows what light is when un- 
folded, so Christ reveals the nature of God. 

2. As all of the rainbow is sunlight, so all of 
Christ's divine soul is God ! 

3. As the rainbow was when the light was, or from 
eternity, so Christ was when the Father was, or from 
eternity. 



262 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

4. As the bow may be on the earth and the sun in 
the sky, and yet the solar radiance remain undi- 
vided, so God may remain in heaven, and appear on 
earth as Christ, and his oneness not be divided. 

5. As the perishable raindrop is used in the revela- 
tion of the rainbow, so was Christ's body in the reve- 
lation to men of God in Christ. 

6. As at the same instant the sunlight is itself, and 
also the rainbow and heat, so at the same moment 
Christ is both himself and the Father, and both the 
Father and the Holy Ghost. 

7. As solar heat has a peculiarity incommunicable 
to solar color, and solar color a peculiarity incom- 
municable to solar light, and solar light a peculiarity 
incommunicable to either solar color or solar heat, 
so each of the three — the Father, Son, and Holy 
Ghost — has a peculiarity incommunicable to either 
of the others. 

8. But as solar light, heat, and color are one solar 
radiance, so the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are one 
God. 

9. As neither solar heat, light, nor color is itself 
without the aid of the others, so neither Father, Son, 
nor Holy Ghost is God without the others. 

10. As solar heat, light, and color are each solar 
radiance, so Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are each 
God. 

11. As the solar rainbow fades from sight, and its 
light continues to exist, so Christ ceases to be mani- 
fest, and yet is present. 

12. As the rainbow issues from sunlight, and re- 



THE TELNTTY AKD TEITHEISM. 263 

turns to the general bosom of the radiance of the 
sky. so Christ comes from the Father, appears for 
a while, and returns, and yet is not absent from the 
earth. 

13. As the influence of the heat is that of the 
light of the sun, so are the operations of the Holy 
Spirit Christ's continued life. 

14. As is the relation of all vegetable growths to 
solar light and heat, so is the relation of all religious 
growths in general history, in the church, and in the 
individual, to the Holy Spirit, a present Christ. 

It was my fortune once, on an October Sabbath 
evening, to stand alone at the grave of Wordsworth, 
in green Grasmere, in the English lake district, and 
to read there the Ode on Immortality, which your 
Emerson calls the highest-water mark of modern 
poetry and philosophy. While my eyes were fas- 
tened on the page, the sun was setting behind the 
gnarled, inaccessible English cliffs, not far away to 
the west, and a colossal rainbow was spread over the 
azure of the sky, and the glowing purple and brown 
of the heathered hills in the east. A light rain fell 
on me, and with my own tears wet the pages of the 
poet. What, now, if some one, as I worshipped 
there, had come to me, in a holy of holies in my life, 
and had said roughly, in Thomas Paine's way, " You 
believe in five Gods; you are not scientific"? Or 
what if some one had said, in Parker's way, " The 
perfection of God has never been accepted by any 
sect in the Christian world. In the Ecclesiastic 
conception of Deity there is a fourth person, the 



264 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

Devil, as much a part of Deity as either Son or Holy 
Ghost" (Weiss's Life of Parker, vol. ii. p. 470). 
" Vicarious atonement teaches salvation without 
morality, only by belief in absurd teaching " (Ibid., 
p. 497)". 

"According to the popular theology there are 
three acknowledged persons in the Godhead. God 
the Father is made to appear remarkable for three 
things, — great power, great selfishness, and great 
destructiveness. The Father is the grimmest object 
in the universe " {Sermons on Theism, p. 101). 
"He is the Draco of the universe, — more cruel than 
Odin or Baal, — the author of sin, but its unforgiving 
avenger. Men rush from the Father ; they flee to 
the Son." "The popular theology makes Jesus a 
God, and does not tell us of God now near at hand. 
Science mast lay his kingly head in the dust, Rea- 
son veil her majestic countenance, Conscience bow 
him to the earth, Affection keep silence, when the 
priest uplifts the Bible " (Discourses on Religion, 
pp. 425-427). 

How would all that speech of the Parkers and the 
Paines have jarred upon my soul, if standing there 
alone in a strange land, and at the grave of Words- 
worth, I had heard the profane collision of their 
accusations with the holy sentences of this seer, fed 
from the cradle to the tomb upon Christian truth ! 
If, at Wordsworth's grave, disturbed by such ghoulish 
attack, I had needed a spell to disperse the accusa- 
tions, what better Procul, procul, este profani could 
I have chosen than these words, once uttered in this 



THE TRINITY AND TEITHEISM. 265 

city by a renowned teacher of this accused theology, 
a man of whom it might be said, as he once said 
of Jonathan Edwards, that he might have been the 
first poet of his nation, if he had not chosen to be its 
first theologian ! [Applause.] 

A majestic discourse delivered at the installation 
of the revered pastor of the Old South Church yon- 
der says, " Other men may be alone ; but the Chris- 
tian, wherever he moves, is near to his Master. 
Every effect is the result of some free will ; but 
many effects within and without us are not produced 
by a created will : therefore they are produced by an 
uncreated. On the deep sea, under the venerable 
oak, in the pure air of the mountain-top, the Chris- 
tian communes with the Father of spirits, who is 
the Saviour of men. All ethical axioms are his reve- 
lation of himself to his children. Their innocent 
joys are his words of good cheer. Their deserved 
sorrows are his loud rebukes." 

In these words of Professor Park, a benighted 
believer in three Gods, as you say [applause] , is God 
afar off? Are there three Gods here? Does Science 
bow her head, Affection grow dumb, Reason muffle 
her face, as this priest lifts up the Bible ? 

As the rainbow shows the inner structure of the 
light, so the character of our Lord shows the inner 
moral nature of God, so far as that can be known to 
man. A rainbow is unravelled light, is it not ? It 
was assuredly better for me at Wordsworth's grave 
to look on the bow I saw in the East than to gaze 
on the white radiance that fell on the poet's page, 



266 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

when I wished to behold the fullest glory of the 
light. So assuredly it is better for us to gaze on 
God's character as revealed in Christ than on God's 
character as revealed in his works merely, if we would 
understand God's nature. As the rainbow is unrav- 
elled light, so Christ is unravelled God. At Words- 
worth's grave I might have heard these hoarse voices 
from the Paines and the Parkers, and these softer, 
and I think more penetratingly human ones from the 
Words worths and the Parks; but, in the name of the 
scientific method, it would have been impossible not 
to have asserted in my soul that the God who was 
revealed in Christ was, and is, and is to come ; for 
there is but one God, and he was, and is, and is to 
come ; and, therefore, when the bow faded from the 
East, I did not think that it had ceased to be. It 
had not been annihilated ; ifc had been revealed for a 
while, and, disappearing, it was received back into 
the bosom of the general radiance, and yet continued 
to fall upon the earth. In every beam of white light 
there is potentially all the color which we find un- 
ravelled in the rainbow; and so in all the pulsations 
in the will of God the Father in his works, exist the 
pulsations of the heart of Him who wept over Jeru- 
salem, and on whose bosom once the beloved disciple 
leaned ; for there is but one God, who was, and is, 
and is to come ; and on the same bosom we bow our 
heads whenever we bow our foreheads upon that Sinai 
within us which we call the moral law. [Applause.] 
The Holy Spirit to me is Christ's continued life. 
But you say, my friends, that this may be philo- 



THE TKINITY AND TEITHEISM. 267 

sophical, but that it is not biblical truth. You affirm 
that I teach myself this by science rather than by 
Scripture. Gentlemen, under the noon of New-Eng- 
land philosophical and biblical culture, and in pres- 
ence of I know not how many who dissent, I ask you 
to decide for yourselves what the Scriptures really 
teach as to the unity of the three subsistences in 
that Divine Nature which was, and is, and is to come. 
Assuredly you will be ready, in the name of literary 
science, to cast at least one searching glance upon 
this whole theme from the point of view of exclu- 
sively biblical statement. 

" It is expedient for you that I go away. I have 
yet many things to say unto you. I will not leave 
you orphans. I am coming to you. A little while 
and ye shall not see me, and again a little while and 
ye shall see me, because I go to the Father." They 
who heard these sentences said, " A little while and 
ye shall not see me, and again a little while and ye 
shall see me, and because I go to the Father? What 
is this he saith? We cannot tell what he saith." 
But there came a later day, when He who had made 
that promise breathed upon them, and said, ''Receive 
ye the gift of the Holy Ghost." We shall not be 
here, all of us will be mute, and most of us forgotten, 
when, in a better age, the meaning of that symbolic 
act of the Author of Christianity is fathomed. 

Next there came a day when there was a sound 
as of a rushing, mighty wind ; and this filled all the 
house where they who had witnessed that act were 
sitting. This is but the experience of many nations 



268 TEANSCENDENTALISM. 

since then, — the rushing sound of a new influence 
in human history, quickening human consciences, 
transforming bad lives into good, but, until that 
time, never felt in the world in deluges, although it 
had appeared in streams. When that influence 
came, what was the interpretation put upon it by 
the scriptural writers ? Peter, standing up, said, 
" We heard, from him whom we know that God has 
raised from the dead, the promise of the Holy Ghost. 
He hath shed forth this; therefore, let Jerusalem 
know assuredly that God hath made him Lord." I 
call that Peter's colossal therefore. It is the 
strongest word in the first oration delivered in the 
defence of Christianity. The Holy Spirit was prom- 
ised ; it has been poured out : therefore, let those who 
receive it know that the power behind natural law — 
our Lord who was, and is, and is to come — is now 
breathing upon the centuries as he breathed upon 
us symbolically. He has shed forth this : therefore, 
let all men know assuredly that God hath made 
him Lord. When they who were assembled in 
Jerusalem at that time heard this therefore^ they 
were pricked in the heart. 

I affirm that it is incontrovertible, that the New- 
Testament writers, everywhere with Stephen, gaze 
steadfastly into heaven, and behold our Lord, not in 
Galilee, not on the Mount of Olives, but at the right 
hand of the Father. Our imagination always looks 
eastward through England, as through the East win- 
dow of a cathedral ; and so we look out through vapor 
sometimes, through literalness, or through material- 



THE TRINITY AND TEITHEISM. 269 

istic haze, thicker than vapor occasionally ; and we 
have not strength of imagination or fervor of spirit 
enough to understand this literature of the East, on 
the face of which the world has gazed eighteen 
hundred years, and seen its face to be like that of 
Stephen, as the face of an angel, and from the same 
cause. The whole New Testament, being full of the 
Holy Ghost, gazes, not as England and America do, 
into Gethsemane, or upon any sacred mount, but 
into heaven, and beholds our Lord at the right hand 
of the Father. I have bowed down upon the Mount 
of Olives, I have had unreportable experiences in 
the Garden of Gethsemane, and on the banks of Jor- 
dan, and on the white, sounding shore of Galilee, 
and on Lebanon, and on Carmel, and on Tabor ; and 
God forbid that I should underrate at all a religion 
that reverences sacred places ; but, of these sacred 
places the New Testament proclaims, " He is not 
here : he has arisen and is ascended." It nowhere 
exhibits our narrowness of outlook. 

What if, under the dome of St. Peter's, there were 
but four windows ? What if children were brought 
up to look out yonder upon the Apennines, and here 
upon the Mediterranean, and there upon the Coli- 
seum, and here upon St. Onofrio's oak, under which 
Tasso sung? If children were brought up before 
these windows, and did not pass from one to the 
other, they might possibly think the outlook from 
each one was Italy ; and so it is ; but it is only a part 
of Italy. We are poor children, brought up, some 
of us, before the window of science, some of us 



270 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

before the window of art, some of us before the 
window of politics, some of us before the window 
of biblical inculcation ; and we say in petulant tones 
to each other, each at his accustomed outlook, 
"This is Italy." What is Italy? Sweep off the 
dome, and answer, " There is but one sky." [Ap- 
plause.] And that and all beneath it is Italy. 

As a fact in literature, it must be affirmed that 
this is the central thought of the New-Testament 
Scriptures. 

We find, that, when one called Saul of Tarsus jour- 
neyed to Damascus, — this is trite, because eighteen 
hundred years have heard it, and the trite is the 
important thing in history, — he heard, from a light 
above the brightness of this noon, the words, " I am 
Jesus ; " and so, later on, Paul wrote, that " we, be- 
holding, as in a glass, the glory of the Lord, are 
changed with the same image from glory to glory 
as by the Lord the Spirit." "The Spirit is the 
Lord," was St. Augustine's reading of' Paul's words. 

So, in the last pages of Revelation, I find that he 
who was the beloved disciple was in the Spirit on 
the Lord's Day, and that he beheld " one whose voice 
was like unto the sound of many waters, and whose 
countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength." 
" When I saw him," says this great poet and prophet 
and apostle, " I, who have been called a son of thun- 
der ; I who, when Cerinthus was in the same bath 
with me, cried out, Away, thou heretic ! I who have 
been ready at any time to suffer martyrdom, — I fell at 
his feet as dead. He laid his right hand on me, say- 



THE TRINITY AND TRITHEISM. 271 

ing unto me, fear not ; I am the first and the last ; I 
am he that liveth, and was dead ; behold I am alive 
forevermore, and have the keys of life and of death." 

It is significant beyond comment, that our Lord 
was often called " The Spirit," and « The Spirit of 
God," by the earlier Christian writers. " The Son is 
the Holy Spirit " is a common expression. Ignatius 
said, " Christ is the Immaculate Spirit " (Ad Smym. 
init.). Tertullian wrote, " The Spirit of God and 
the Reason of God — Word of Reason, and Reason 
and Spirit of Word — Jesus Christ our Lord, who is 
both the one and the other " {JDe Or at. init.') Cyprian 
and Irenaeus said, " He is the Holy Spirit." (See 
Delitzsch's System of Biblical Psychology.) 

Neander, in paraphrase of Peter's oration, says, in 
summarizing the New-Testament literature, " From 
the extraordinary appearances which have filled you 
with astonishment, you perceive, that, in his glorified 
state, he is now operating with divine energy among 
those who believe in him. The heavenly Father has 
promised that the Messiah shall fill all who believe 
on him with the power of the Divine Spirit, and this 
promise is now being fulfilled. Learn, then, from 
these events, in which you behold the prophecies of 
the Old Testament fulfilled, the nothingness of all 
that you have attempted against him, and know that 
God has exalted Him whom you crucified to be Mes- 
siah, the ruler of God's kingdom ; and that, through 
Divine Power, he will overawe all his enemies." 
(Neander, Planting of Christianity, Bonn's edition, 
i. 19. Summary of Peter's speech in Acts ii.) 



272 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

So Alford writes, " Christ is the Spirit ; is identical 
with the Holy Spirit, not personally nor essentially, 
but (as is shown by the spirit of the Lord following) 
in this department of his divine working : Christ 
here is the Spirit of Christ" (Remarks on 2 Cor. 
iii. 17). 

Lange, writing on the same passage of this litera- 
ture, adds, " We find here such an identification of 
Christ and the Holy Spirit, that the Lord to whom 
the heart turns is in no practical respect different 
from the Holy Spirit received in conversion. Christ 
is virtually the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is his spirit " 
(Lange, 2 Cor. iii. 17, 18). 

What if Peter at Antioch had beheld the earliest 
triumphs of Christianity under persecution, and had 
heard the story of the martyrdoms which became the 
seed of the church, and caused Christians to be called 
by that name, and that shot through with hope the 
unspeakable despair of Roman Paganism as by the 
first rays of the dawn, could he not, looking on Leba- 
non and Tabor, on Jerusalem and Galilee, have said, 
" He hath shed forth this advance of Christianity in 
h uman affairs ? God has a plan, and he thus reveals 
it. God is giving triumph to Christianity : therefore 
let Lebanon and Tabor, let Jerusalem and Galilee, 
know assuredly that God hath made our Lord the 
Lord of the Roman earth indeed, and that the influ- 
ence of the Holy Ghost is Christ's continued life." 

What if, later, when Christianity had ascended the 
throne of the Ctesars, Peter had stood on the Tiber, 
and had beheld philosophy, little by little, permeated 



THE TRINITY AND TEITHEISM. 273 

by Christianity ? What if he had looked back on the 
persecutions and martyrdoms which gave purity and 
power to early Christianity, and which make her 
record, even to your infidel Gibbon, venerable be- 
yond comment ? Could not Peter, there on the Tiber, 
have said, looking on the Apennines and Vesuvius and 
the Mediterranean, and on Egypt, " Let Rome and 
the Tiber, let Alexandria and the Nile, know as- 
suredly, since our Lord — who was, and is, and is to 
come — hath shed forth this, that he is Lord" ? 

What if, later, Peter, standing on the Bosphorus, 
when Rome had lost her footing on the Tiber, had 
beheld the rushing in of the Turks to pulverize the 
sunrise foot of old Rome ; what if he had remem- 
bered the day, when, standing on two feet, Rome, 
planting herself on both the Tiber and the Bospho- 
rus, folded her arms, and looked at the North Star, 
and proclaimed herself likely to be as eternal as that 
stellar light ; what if, remembering all that had come, 
and all that had gone, he had beheld that Colossus 
topple toward the West, smite itself into pieces on 
the Alps, and fail in fragments on the Rhine, on the 
Elbe, on the Oder, some pieces scattered across the 
howling North Sea to the Thames, and to the sites of 
Oxford and Cambridge, these fragments of old Rome, 
built up in these places into universities which caused 
at last the illumination which brought the Reforma- 
tion ; what if Peter, beholding thus the Greeks driven 
toward the sunset, and old Rome becoming seed for 
the Reformation, had stood on the Seine, on the Elbe, 
on the Oder, and had witnessed the varied progress 



274 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

of the ideas of Him who affirmed once that he had 
many things yet to say, — might not Peter there, 
side by side with Luther, have said once more, u He 
hath shed forth this : therefore, let the Alps and the 
Rhine and the Seine and the Elbe, the Thames and 
the German Sea, know assuredly that this Gulf Cur- 
rent in human history, now two thousand years old, 
is not an accident [applause] ; that it means all it 
expresses : for what God does, he from the first in- 
tends to do? He who has thus watched over the 
cause of Christian truth, and has been breathing the 
Holy Ghost upon the nations, hath shed forth this ; 
and, therefore, let Berlin and Paris and London, and 
Oxford and Cambridge, know assuredly that God 
hath made him Lord." 

What if, later, when the tempest of persecution, 
rising out of the sunrise, smote upon those universi- 
ties, and blew the Mayflower across the sea, Peter 
had taken position in that vessel, as its billowing, 
bellying, bellowing sails fled across the great deep in 
the icy breath of that time ; and what if he had 
seen, on the deck of that Mayflower, a few rush- 
lights taking their gleam from those universities, 
themselves illumined by the fire that fell at Pente- 
cost ? What if Peter, afterward, standing on Plym- 
outh Rock, had seen these rush-lights kindling 
others, and a line of rush-lights, representing the 
same illumination of the Holy Spirit, go out into our 
wilderness, until they glass themselves in the Con- 
necticut and in the Hudson, and in the eyes of the 
wild beasts of the murmuring pines and hemlocks, 



THE TRINITY AND TRITHEISM. 275 

and in the eternal roar of Niagara, and in the Great 
Lakes, and in the Mississippi, and in the springs of 
the Sierras, and at last in the soft, hissing foam of 
the Pacific seas ; what if, beholding these rush-lights 
thus carried across a continent by divine guidance, 
Peter had stood here, — would not the force of his 
word therefore have had new emphasis as he should 
have said, " He hath shed forth this : therefore, let 
Boston, let New York, let Chicago, let San Francisco, 
let the surf of the Bay of Fundy, let the waterfalls 
of the Yosemite, know assuredly that God hath made 
him Lord " ? 

But what if, when a tempest sprung out of the 
South, and these rush-lights were, I will not say ex- 
tinguished, but all bent to the earth, and painfully 
tried, some of them blown out, he had beheld the 
lights, little by little, after the tempest had gone 
down, begin to be carried southward, and at last 
glass themselves in the steaming bayous and the Gulf? 
what if, although some had been extinguished for- 
ever, he had seen them shining on the breaking of 
the fetters of three million slaves? what if the 
churches, when the tempest ceases, grow brighter in 
their assertion of the value of their light, and are 
filling the land with its influence, and, if God con- 
tinues to illumine them, will make the rush-lights glass 
themselves yet in all the streams, in all the springs, 
and in all the sprays on all the shores of all the land, 
— could not he, looking on such results in a territory 
greater than Rome ever ruled over, have said, " He 
hath shed forth this : therefore, let America know as- 
suredly that God hath made him Lord " ? 



276 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

But what if, lastly, Peter had beheld a rush-light 
taken across the Pacific to the Sandwich Islands, and 
one to Japan, and one to China, and one to India, 
and had seen the soft rolling globe enswathed in all 
its zones by rush-lights bearing the very flames which 
fell at Pentecost, and beaten on, indeed, by persecu- 
tion here and there, but not likely to be beaten on 
ever again as fiercely as they have been already; not 
likely to be blown out everywhere, even if they are 
in some places, and thus ensphering the globe so that 
it is not probable at all, under the law of the survival 
of the fittest, that they will be put out [applause] , — 
could not Peter, then, looking on what God has done, 
and what he therefore intended to do ; looking on the 
incontrovertible fact, that the islands of the sea and 
the continents have been coming to prefer Christian 
thought, and seem likely to remain under its influ- 
ence, — could he not, while standing on scientific and 
biblical ground at once, have affirmed in the name 
both of science and of Scripture the transfiguring 
truth, " He hath shed forth this : therefore, let Asia 
on the Himalaya tops, let Europe in the Parthenon 
and Coliseum, let London's mystic roar, let the New 
World in her youthful vigor, let all the islands of 
the sea, know assuredly that the fittest has survived, 
and that the fittest will survive ; and that God hath 
made him Lord who is fittest to be so " ? All the 
seas, in all their waves, on all their shores, would an- 
swer to such an assertion, Hallelujah ! So be it. The 
influences of the Holy Spirit are Christ's continued 
life. [Applause.] 



. 



XI. 



FEAGMENTAEINESS OF OUTLOOK UPON THE DI- 
VINE NATURE. 

THE SIXTY-NINTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC- 
TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE MARCH 12. 



" Vox nostra quae sit accipe. 
Est Christus et Pater Deus: 
Servi hujus ac testes sumus; 
Extorque si potes fidem. 

Tormenta, career, ungulse 
Stridensque flammis lamina 
Atque ipsa poenarum ultima; 
Mors Christianis ludus est." 

Prud. Peristeph. Hymn, 5. 57. 



" Deus autem et Pater Domini nostri Jesu Christi, et ipse Sempi- 
ternus Pontifex, Dei Filius Jesus Christus, aedificet vos in fide et 
veritate et in omni mansuetudine, . . . et det vobis sortem et partem 
inter sanctos suos." — Polycarp, ad Phil., 12. 



XI. 



FRAGMENTARINESS OF OUTLOOK UPON 
THE DIVINE NATURE. 

PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. 

In 1640 the whole population of New England 
was English, and consisted of only about four thou- 
sand families, or twenty thousand persons. Bancroft 
points out, that, after the first fifteen years following 
the landing on Plymouth Rock, there was no consid- 
erable addition from England. Your Palfrey shows, 
that, for one hundred and fifty years, the four thou- 
sand families multiplied in remarkable seclusion from 
other communities, and that it is only within the last 
fifty years that the foreigners have come. New Eng- 
land is changing the character of her population to 
such an extent, that we must now look for the de- 
scendants of those who crossed in the Mayflower, 
not so much on the Atlantic slope as in the Missis- 
sippi valley and on the Pacific coast. It is not true 
that New England is becoming New Ireland ; but it 

279 



280 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

is hardly epigrammatic to say that manufacturing 
New England is New Ireland already. 

Perhaps we shall do well to remember, that, while 
the population of the manufacturing centres of New 
England is increasing with extraordinary rapidity, 
that of the agricultural and commercial districts is 
fluctuating, and, in many cases, on the decrease. The 
distinctions between the rich and poor are becoming 
wider in the manufacturing districts. This is partly 
the unavoidable result of the natural growth of the 
power of capital. It is, in part, the consequence of 
the massing of men in cities as distinct from small 
towns. It is, to some extent, the effect of the organi- 
zation of manufacturing industry in great corpora- 
tions on the one side, and an operative population on 
the other.- It is, in large measure, the result of the 
fact, that, in the manufacturing districts of New Eng- 
land, a vastly greater proportion of the population is 
now of foreign descent than fifty years ago. The 
two most typical things in the territory east of the 
Hudson are the college bell and the factory chimney. 
The first New England was a church; the second 
New England is to be a factory. 

What is the worth of the church to the working- 
man? 

Look at the seven cities on the Merrimack River. 
I often hang in imagination over that stream as the 
best emblem of the industrial life of Eastern New 
England. Child of the White Mountains and the 
Pemigewasset, the Merrimack rushes under the spin- 
dles of seven cities to the sea, — Concord, Manches- 



OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATURE. 281 

ter, Nashua, Lowell, Lawrence, Haverhill, Newbury- 
port, — doing more work than any other river of its 
size in the world, and typical more and more of the 
future into which our Atlantic New-England slope is 
drifting. These seven cities have in the aggregate, 
in the last twenty years, more than doubled in wealth 
and population. Romish cathedral churches are ris- 
ing in our manufacturing centres, and are not likely 
to be empty. But, under the voluntary system, many 
of our Protestant churches are looked upon by a 
portion of the operatives as close corporations. When 
a church is not mossy, it is aristocratic, our working- 
men too often think ; and so our floating, unchurched 
populations are coming to be very large in our factory 
centres. 

If I were a working-man, I presume I should want 
fair play between employers and employed. I think 
I should care for my children, and desire to have a 
better place for them than Old England gives the 
very youngest at the factory-wheel. It seems almost 
incredible, that some of the acutest members of our 
Protestant factory-population are falling into neglect 
of the church, when it is certain that only by the 
diffusion of conscientiousness among the laboring- 
classes can co-operation ever succeed ; and that con- 
scientiousness will not be diffused without the use of 
means which the Church herself employs none too 
thoroughly, but which no other organization pretends 
to employ at all as a permanent system for the cul- 
ture of society. Can co-operation ever succeed, un- 
less there are large numbers of honest men in society ? 



282 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

How are these to be made ? In commerce you want 
a revival of business. You want, therefore, a revival 
of undenled religion. How are you to have that, if 
yon are to neglect, I will not say this or that branch 
of the church, but the church as a whole ? If you 
are to shut the doors of God's house on the Sabbath, 
how are you to be sure that diffusion of conscien- 
tiousness will come ? Why do not working-men see 
the great impropriety of their neglecting the church, 
and that the church is made up of men, many of 
whom have risen from the bench of the shoemaker, 
or from the wheel of the operative ? Our New-Eng- 
land society is not divided into hereditary and fixed 
classes. We must look on our churches as the work 
of the people ; and it is not American for a portion 
of our New-England population to regard our 
churches as aristocratic machines. Perhaps some of 
them are ; I am not defending the whole list of them ; 
but most of them, I think ninety out of a hundred, 
are eager to be of service in the diffusion of consci- 
entiousness, and all culture and comfort, among the 
factory population, and in the beating down of all 
the walls of division between the workmen and their 
employers. [Applause.] 

You want arbitration committees ; you want fair 
consultation between capital and labor ? Bring your 
whole population together once a week in the church, 
where all class-walls are, or ought to be, broken 
down. [Applause.] I am not speaking of all the 
churches ; for God has not granted to all men the 
capacity to burst asunder the silken bonds of luxury : 



OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATURE. 283 

he has to some men, and to some who are very 
wealthy. But the most of our churches in New 
England were built by the people, and come from 
the hearts of the average population ; and it is abso- 
lutely suicidal for the working-man to let his chil- 
dren grow up without the religious culture of the 
church. [Applause.] 

Have you ever heard that the Sabbath schools 
have been greatly improved in the last fifty years ? 
There is a liberal denomination which lately has been 
issuing Sabbath-school volumes with questions about 
the relations between religion and science. I thank 
God for that step in advance. Let it be understood 
that the Sabbath school is now a better thing than it 
used to be, and that you cannot let your children 
stay out of it without putting them behind other 
children. Do you wish to have that spirit of good 
sense pervade the community which you would like 
to find in the arbitration board? You will never 
have it, unless you take possession of the church and 
of the ministry. The latter are rather a numerous 
and well-educated class, and they have much oppor- 
tunity to study public questions : why cannot you 
win them to your side ? [Applause.] There is a 
strategic act for workingmen to do on the Merri- 
mack ! [Applause.] 

When you and I are no longer in the world, the 
supreme question in New-England, civilization will 
be how to make Plymouth Rock the corner-stone 
of a factory. [Applause.] Do not say that I am 
uttering any thing irreverent, when I speak of that 



284 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

sacred spot on the shore yonder as fit to be the 
beginning of the newest New England, as it was of 
the earliest. Plymouth Rock was the corner-stone 
of the first New England : shall it be the corner- 
stone of the second ? Where are the builders that 
shall place that jagged and fundamental rock in line 
with the other stones of the wall ? Shall we hew 
the factory to make it fit Plymouth Rock, or Plym- 
outh Rock to fit the factory ? God send us no 
future into which Plymouth Rock cannot be built 
unhewn ! [Applause.] You think it is a very 
unpoetic, prosaic fact, that New England is to be a 
factory. Goethe, our modern philosopher and poet, 
used to say the sound of spindles in Manchester was 
the most poetic sound of this century. Not every 
man has Goethe's ears. He foresaw the time when 
a greater proportion than now of the population 
of the world will be in cities, and when the most 
numerous inhabitants in cities will be of the opera- 
tive class. Thomas Carlyle says somewhere, " Have 
you ever listened to the awakening of Manchester in 
Old England at half-past five by the clock? ten 
thousand times ten thousand looms and spindles all 
set moving there, like the broom of an Atlantic tide. 
It is, if you think of it, sublime as Niagara, or more 
so." Sometimes I have repeated to myself these 
words when awaking in the gray morning on Beacon 
Hill, as I have listened to the factory bells, and 
allowed imagination to move up the Merrimack, past 
Newburyport, Haverhill, and Lawrence and Lowell, 
and Manchester and Concord, and to see the crowds of 



OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATURE. 285 

the operative class coming out in streams in the early- 
dawn. It is sublime, and it is to be more and more 
sublime as the years pass ? But only the church, cap- 
tured by the working-men, and able to capture the 
working-men in return, can prevent in our free so- 
ciety, when once New England is crowded with manu- 
facturing centres, those collisions between capital and 
labor which have arisen in the Old World. [Ap- 
plause.] You never can bridge the chasm between 
capital and labor here by a kid glove. [Applause.] 
You never can bridge it with the bayonet. [Ap- 
plause.] In the Old World it has been bridged by 
the bayonet on the continent and by the kid glove 
in England; but in New England the only bridge 
that will cross that chasm is popular, scientific, 
aggressive, deadly Christianity, laid on the buttresses 
of the Sabbaths and the common schools. [Ap- 
plause.] 

THE LECTURE. 

The River Rhine is a majestic stream, until, in the 
Netherlands of the North Sea shore, it divides into 
shallows and swamps and steaming oozes. Man's 
adoration of God is a majestic stream, until, in the 
Netherlands of religious experience, it divides among 
three Gods, or among many Gods, and so becomes a 
collection of shallows and swamps and steaming 
oozes. Out of these North Sea hollow lands, wher- 
ever they have existed in any age of the moral 
experience of the race, there has invariably arisen a 
vapor obscuring the wide, undivided azure, and even 



286 TEANSCENDENTALISM. 

the near landscapes of natural truth. Give me the 
Christian and the scientific surety of the unity of 
the Divine Nature, and let my whole soul flow 
toward one God ; let me not worship three separate 
wills, three separate consciences, three separate sets 
of affections, but one Will, one Conscience, one Heart, 
which was, and is, and is to come ; and so long as 
the Alps of thought feed me with their cool, im- 
petuous, crystalline streams, I shall be like the 
Rhine, deep enough in the current of my adoring 
affections to drive out the drift-wood and bowlders 
in the stream, and not permit them to accumulate, 
and form islands to divide the river into shallows 
and oozes. Let me move toward God, one in nature 
outside of the soul, one in Christ revealed in history, 
one as tangible to the conscience in the intuitions. 
Let me feel that all these subsistences are one Sub- 
stance ; and it may be that the Rhine of the human 
affections, turned thus toward God as one Will, one 
Heart, and one Conscience, will be majestic enough 
to float fleets both for peace and for war [applause] ; 
and will go out into the ocean at last, not as a set 
of befogged shallows and oozes, but as the Amazon 
goes out, an undivided river into an undivided ocean, 
a thousand flashing leagues caught up into infinite 
times ten thousand flashing leagues, the interspher- 
ing of wave with wave in every case, the interspers- 
ing of a portion of the finite personality with the 
Infinite PersonalhVy, one, invisible, omnipotent, omni- 
present, eternal, the same yesterday, to-day, and 
forever, holy, holy, holy, Father, Son, and Holy 
Ghost. 



OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATUEE. 287 

For one, I had rather, my Mends, go back to the 
Bosphorus, where I stood a few months ago, and 
worship with that emperor who lately slit his veins, 
and went hence by suicide, than to be in name only 
an orthodox believer, or in theory to hold that there 
is but one God, but in imagination to worship three 
Gods. I am orthodox, I hope ; but my first concern, 
is to be straightforward. I purpose to be straight- 
forward, even if I must be orthodox. [Applause.] 
Revere the orthodoxy of straightforwardness ; and 
when that justifies you in doing so, but only then, 
revere the straightforwardness of orthodoxy. [Ap- 
plause.] Mahometan Paganism yonder contains one 
great truth, — the Divine Unity ; and I never touch 
this majestic theme of the Divine Triunity without 
remembering what that single truth, as I heard it 
uttered on the Bosphorus, did for me when I knelt 
there once in a mosque with the emperor and with 
the peasants, with the highest officers of state and 
with the artisans, and saw them all bow down, and 
bring their foreheads to the mats of the temple, and 
heard them call out, from the highest to the lowest, 
as they prostrated themselves, " Allah el akbar ! " 
" God is one, and God is great." So, prostrating 
themselves, they three times called out, " Allah el 
akbar ! " and then remained silent, until I felt that 
this one truth had in it a transfiguration. I affirm 
that I had rather go back to that shore of the azure 
water which connects the Black Sea with the Med- 
iterranean, and, omitting the leprosy of Mahome- 
tanism, take for my religion pure Theism, than to 



288 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

hold that there are three Gods with three wills, three 
sets of affections, three intellects, three consciences, 
and thus to deny the assurances of both scriptural 
and scientific truth, and make of myself the begin- 
ning of a polytheist, although calling myself ortho- 
dox. 

At what should we arrive, however, if we should 
adopt the bare idea of the Divine Unity without 
taking also that of the Triunity ? Should we thus 
be faithful to the scientific method? Should we 
thus be looking at all the facts ? Should we obtain 
by this method the richest conception of God, or 
should we see from such a point of view only a 
fragment of that portion of his nature which man 
may apprehend ? 

Theodore Parker taught God's Immanence in mind 
and matter, and it is amazing that he thought this 
truth a new one. If you are of my opinion, you will 
reverence that one portion of his far from original 
teaching ; for it is at once a scientific and a Chris- 
tian certainty, that, wherever God acts, there he is. 
The Bridgewater Treatises affirm this truth with 
more emphasis than Parker ever laid upon it. The 
one chord which he struck in theology to which all 
hearts vibrate was the certainty of the Divine Imma- 
nence in matter and mind; and this one certainty 
was the secret of any power he had in distinctively 
religious endeavor. Men, he said, have a conscience ; 
and in that conscience the moral law is revealed; 
and that moral law reveals a Holy Person. 

Your Helmholtz and Wundt, and Beale and 



. 



OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATURE. 289 

Carpenter, and Herschel and Faraday, and Darwin 
and Agassiz, as well as your Lotze and Kant and 
Leibnitz, and your St. Chrysostom, and Jeremy 
Taylor, and Archbishop Butler, all unite with Plato 
and Aristotle, and David and Isaiah, in asserting 
the Divine Personal Immanence in matter and mind. 
There is no cloud at this moment shot through by 
the noon so- completely saturated by light- as all 
mind and matter are by the Divine Immanence ; that 
is to say, by this invisible, incomprehensible Person- 
ality which the moral law reveals. 

But, granting the fact of the Divine Personal im- 
manence in matter and mind, to what results must a 
rigid use of the scientific jnethod bring us on the theme 
of the Triunity of the Divine Nature ? I know of no 
question on this topic fairer or more fruitful than 
this. 

1. Since a Personal God is immanent in all mat- 
ter and mind, it follows, that, in all nature outside 
the soul, we look into God's face. 

2. For the same reason, it is incontrovertible, that 
in the soul we call Christ, and in his influence in 
history, w r e look into God's face. 

3. For the same reason, it is certain, that, in the 
intuitions of conscience, we look into God's face. 

4. These three spheres of his self-manifestation em- 
brace all of God that can btJcnoivn to man. 

5. Im each of these spheres of the self manifestation 
of the Divine Nature, something is shown which is not 
shown with equal clearness in either of tlie other 
spheres. In each of them, the Ineffable Immanent 
Person says something new. 



290 TKANSCENDENTALISM. 

6. In external nature he appears chiefly as Creator; 
in Christ chiefly as Redeemer ; in conscience chiefly 
as Sanctiiier. 

7. These are all facts scientifically known. 

8. A scientific scheme of religious thought must look 
at all the facts. 

9. When all the facts known to man are taken into 
view, a Trinity of Divine Manifestations is, therefore, 
scientifically demonstrable. 

10. But, according to the admitted proposition that 
a Personal Crod is immanent in all matter and mind, 
he reveals himself in each of these manifestations as a 
Person, and yet as one. 

11. A Personal Triunity, of which Creator, Re- 
deemer, and Sanctifier are but other names, is therefore 
scientifically known to exist. 

12. This is the Trinity which Christianity calls 
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and of all parts of 
whose undivided glory it inculcates adoration in the 
name of what God is, and of what he has done, and 
of what man needs, 

All these propositions you will grant me, except the 
second ; but you cannot deny that, without throwing 
away your own admission that a Personal God is im- 
manent in all matter and mind. 

Even Rousseau could say that Socrates died like 
a man, but the Founder of Christianity like a God. 
Carlyle affirms that Voltaire's attacks on Christi- 
anity are a battering-ram, swinging in the wrong 
direction. Who doubts, that, at the head of the 
effect we call Christianity, there was an adequate 



OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATURE. 291 

Cause, or a Person? and who can deny, that, in the 
soul of that Person, God spake to man as never 
before or since ? Scholarship has outgrown the old 
forms of historical doubt ; and historical science 
now admits, that, whether we say Christ possessed 
proper Deity or not, he assuredly has been the chief 
religious teacher of the race. But that fact means 
more than much, if looked at on all sides. Keep in 
mind here that glimpse of the world history on 
which we were gazing when last we parted from this 
Temple. 

Napoleon at St. Helena said that something mys- 
terious exists in universal history in its relation to 
Christianity. " Can you tell me who Jesus Christ 
was ? " said this Italian, greater than Csesar, and as 
free from partisan religious prejudices. The question 
was declined by Bertrand ; and Napoleon proceeded, 
" Well, then, I will tell you." I am reading now 
from a passage authorized by three of Napoleon's 
biographers, and freely accepted by European schol- 
ars as an authoritative statement of his conversation 
in exile. (See Liddon's Bampton Lectures, Eng. 
ed., p. 148, for a full list of authorities for this ex- 
tract.) " Alexander, Csesar, Charlemagne, and I my- 
self have founded great empires ; but upon what did 
these creations of our genius depend ? Upon force. 
Jesus alone founded his empire upon love ; and to 
this very day millions would die for him. ... I 
think I understand something of human nature ; and 
I tell you all these were men, and I am a man. No 
other is like him : Jesus Christ was more than a 



292 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

man. I have inspired multitudes with such an enthu- 
siastic devotion, that they would have died for me : 
but, to do this, it was necessary that I should be visi- 
bly present with the electric influence of my looks, 
of my words, of my voice. When I saw men, and 
spoke with them, I lighted up the flame of self-devo- 
tion in their hearts. . . . Christ alone has succeeded 
in so raising the mind of man toward the Unseen, 
that it becomes insensible to the barriers of time and 
space. Across a chasm of eighteen hundred years 
Jesus Christ makes a demand which is beyond all 
others difficult to satisfy. He asks for that which a 
philosopher may often seek in vain at the hands of 
his friends, or a father of his children, or a bride of 
her spouse, or a man of his brother. He asks for the 
human heart ; he will have it entirely to himself ; he 
demands it unconditionally, and forthwith his de- 
mand is granted. Wonderful ! In defiance of time 
and space, the soul of man, with all its powers and 
faculties, becomes an annexation to the empire of 
Christ. All ivho sincerely believe in him experience 
that remarkable supernatural love towards him. This 
phenomenon is unaccountable ; it is altogether beyond 
the scope of man's creative poivers. Time, the great 
destroyer, is powerless to extinguish this sacred flame : 
time can neither exhaust its strength, nor put a limit to 
its range. This is what strikes me most : I have often 
thought of it. This it is which proves to me quite con- 
vincingly the divinity of Jesus Christ." [Applause.] 
It is beyond all controversy, that precisely this 
central thought of Christianity which convinced 



. 



OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATURE. 293 

Napoleon was what most struck the ancient Roman 
philosophers. Christ's continued life in the Holy 
Spirit, was that heard of in the first centuries ? 
Why, I open an ancient book, written in opposition to 
Christianity, and cited by Arnobius, and I read, " Our 
gods are not displeased with you Christians for wor- 
shipping the Almighty God ; but you maintain the 
Deity of one who was put to death on the cross ; you 
believe him to be yet alive (et super esse adltuc creditis), 
and you adore him with daily supplications " (Ar- 
nobius, adv. G-entes, i. 36). Pliny's letter to Trajan 
implies all this, but is so celebrated, that I need not 
recite its majestic facts here. 

Men showed me at Rome, in the Kircherian Muse- 
um, a square foot of the plaster of a wall of a pal- 
ace, not many years ago uncovered on the Palatine 
Hill. On the poor clay was traced a cross bearing a 
human figure with a brute's head. The figure was 
nailed to the cross ; and before it a soldier was repre- 
sented kneeling, and extending his hands, in the 
Greek posture of devotion. Underneath all was 
scratched in rude lettering in Greek, " Alexamenos 
adores his God." That representation of the central 
thought of Christianity was made in a jeering mo- 
ment by some rude soldier in the days of Caracalla ; 
but it blazes there now in Rome, the most majestic 
monument of its age in the world. (See Liddon, 
Bampton Lectures, p. 396.) 

You believe your Lord is yet alive ? You adore 
him? All the history of the early persecutions of 
Christianity accords with the import of tins Kir- 



294 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

cherian symbol. Listen to the last words of the mar- 
tyrs through all the first five centuries of Christian- 
ity. They are these, and such as these : " O Lord 
God of heaven and earth, Jesu Christ, to thee do I 
bend my neck by way of sacrifice; O Thou who 
abidest forever." These were the words of Felix, an 
African bishop, condemned to death at Venusium. 
(See for a multitude of similar instances Rulnart's 
celebrated work, Acta Marti/rum Sincera, edition Ve- 
ronse.) " O Lord Jesu Christ, Thou Maker of heaven 
and earth, give peace unto thy Church." So spoke 
Theodotus of Ancyra in the extremity of torture. 
(Ibid., p. 303.) 

Poor Blandina, there at Lyons in the year 177, 
you remember how they roasted her, frail girl, on 
the red-hot iron chair ; put her in a net and exposed 
her to the horns of oxen; whirled her in instru- 
ments of torture until her senses were lost, and 
then plunged her into flames ; and day after day did 
that, while she apparently experienced little pain, 
calling out at every interval when her strength came 
back, " I am a Christian : there is no evil done among 
us." And so she passed hence, but speaks to us as 
one yet living. (See Eusebius, v. 1-3, for a con- 
temporary account of Blandina in a letter written 
from the churches of Lyons and Vienne to those 
of Asia Minor.) She " hastened to Christ," says an 
account written by eye-witnesses of her sufferings ; 
and they send " to those having the same faith and 
hope," " Peace, and grace, and glory from God the 
Father, and Christ Jesus, our Lord." Multitudes 



. 



OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATURE. 295 

and multitudes, a great army of martyrs, passed 
out of the world, believing that the influence of 
the Holy Spirit was Christ's continued life ; and, if 
there is any thing mysterious in history, Napoleon 
had his eye upon it when he asked what it is that 
makes the martyrs in every age painless when on 
the bosom of their spouse. 

There was a God in Christ, whether you regard 
him as divine or not ; and that was one revelation of 
God which was made, and is now making, in this in- 
controvertible fact of his earthly influence, which Na- 
poleon thought utterly inexplicable on merely human 
lines of cause and effect. But in conscience there is 
a God. In the moral intuitions of the soul we look 
into God's face. Assuredly, even if you and I were 
not to have, a better age will have, a religious science 
that will take into view all these facts. There is a 
God in external nature ; there is a God in Christ ; 
there is a God in the intuitions of the human spirit : 
and if I could not have any other Trinity than that, 
although I do not believe that to be the best, I would 
have that, for I want all the truth I can reach. I, 
therefore, will look on God . as manifesting himself 
in external nature, and in our intuitions, and in 
history as influenced by his spirit ; and my God will 
be thus revealed to me with more fulness than he 
could be if I had only one of these three personal 
revelations of himself. In each of them he says 
what he does not say elsewhere. Science must be 
hungry to hear all that all facts say. 

Grod is a person in each one of these revelations. 



296 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

i 

He is a person in the strict sense, as seen in external 
nature. As seen in our Lord, he is a person in the 
strict sense. As revealed in the moral law, he is a 
person in the strict sense. But there are not three per- 
sons : he is one person in the strict sense ; for natural 
law is a unit in the universe, and reveals hut one will. 
Three revelations of God are all one person, although 
in each revelation he is a person. Now, is that mys- 
tical ? or does that straightforward use of the scien- 
tific method give a richer view of human history, a 
richer view of the human soul, a richer view of 
external nature, than mere deism, or theism, or ma- 
terialism, or pantheism, however fortified by modern 
science, can present to you? 

Thus far, gentlemen, I have asked you to notice 
only what is involved in Theodore Parker's admis- 
sion that a personal God is immanent in all matter 
and mind. On .this point, as on so many others, 
Theodore Parker failed to carry out consistently his 
own principles, and fell into error not so much 
through a wrong direction as through haste, and in- 
completeness of research. If, my friends, I must at 
this point, to save time, drop analytical discussion, 
and give personal conviction, let me say that Theo- 
dore Parker's scheme of thought, melodious as that 
one feebly-struck note of the Divine Immanence in 
mind and matter is, compares to me with Christian- 
ity as water compares with wine. Tennyson makes 
one of his characters say to another, 

" All thy passions matched with mine 
Are as moonlight unto sunlight, 
And as water unto wine.'' 



. 



OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATURE. 297 

So I aver, in the name of the precision of the sci- 
entific method, that any scheme of thought not Chris- 
tian, as matched with Christianity, and tested fairty 
by intuition, instinct, syllogism, and ages of experi- 
ment, is as moonlight matched with sunlight, or as 
water matched with wine. 

I want supremely such a view of religious truth 
as shall set me at rest about my irreversible record 
of sin. [Applause.] I want such a view of God as 
shall present him as an atoning God, on whom I can- 
not look without the regeneration of my own nature 
through gratitude, and on whom I can look, and yet, 
for his sake, be at peace. 

Why do the ages cling to the doctrines of the 
Trinity ? Perhaps their wants have been much like 
yours and mine. Is the truth of the Divine Trinity 
dear to us, because it is a fine piece of philosophical 
speculation ? Ah, gentlemen, you know life too well 
to think that eighteen centuries have offered up their 
martyrdoms, and the personal careers, which, not end- 
ing at the stake, have been bound to the stake per- 
haps through the better part of the time from birth 
to death, and that these ages have had nothing more 
than philosophy behind them. Great human organic 
wants are revealed by the reception the ivorld has given 
to the deepest religious truths. We knoio we are going 
hence. We wish to go hence in peace. We ivant a reli- 
gion that can wash Lady MacbetKs red right hand. 
"We need to know that an atonement has been pro- 
vided, such that we may look on all God's attributes, 
and then in his merit, not in our own, be at peace 



298 TKANSCENDENTALISM. 

here and in that Unseen Holy into which it is scien- 
tifically sure that all men haste. 

Religious science never teaches that personal de- 
merit is or can be transferred from an individual, 
finite personality to God. That is a ghastly error 
which has been charged to Christianity in every age, 
and nowhere more audaciously or inexcusably than 
in this city. [Applause.] It is one of the most 
monstrous of misconceptions, one of the most unphi- 
losophical of all the hideous caricatures set up by 
Theodore Parker before the public gaze, that Chris- 
tianity teaches that personal demerit or blame-worthi- 
ness may be taken off one soul, and put upon another, 
and that one an innocent being. We hold nothing of 
the sort; but we have been taught that there is 
revealed in Christianity a view of God which repre- 
sents him as substituting chastisement for punish- 
ment, and as thus making possible the peace of all 
who are loyal to him ; and this has been the regen- 
erating influence which has brought the human spirit 
to the highest summits it has ever attained ; so that, 
both by ages of experience and by philosophy, we 
know that this central portion of the Christian 
scheme of thought is adapted to man's deepest 
wants. [Applause.] 

If you deny the doctrine of the Trinity, you must 
deny the whole central portion of this crowned sys- 
tem of truth, in all its philosophical glory and in all 
its prolonged and multiplex breadth of power in hu- 
man experience. There was nothing so touching, when 
Professor Huntington of Harvard University yonder 



OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATURE. 299 

turned toward the doctrine of the Trinity, as his proc- 
lamation of the " life, comfort, and salvation " which 
burst upon his vastly enlarged horizon as he attained 
at once the scientific, the biblical, and the only his- 
torically radiant point of view. (See Huntington, 
Archbishop, Christian Believing and Living.) 

Only an undiluted Christianity gives such a view 
of God, that we can be true to the scientific method, 
and yet at peace with all his attributes. 

Gentlemen, you will not soon drive out of human 
nature the desire to go hence in peace. You will not 
soon remove from human nature the feeling it has 
exhibited in every age, that peace does not come 
even when we reform. You will not soon change 
the natural operations of conscience. You will not 
soon cause the past to be reversible. You, therefore, 
will not soon make the atonement any thing other 
than a desire of all nations. But, until you have 
done all these things, there will be life, there will be 
a wholly natural and abounding vitality, in that exhi- 
bition of God's nature to man, which represents him 
as an atoning God, and as a person who was, and is, 
and is to be with us, because one with Him who made 
heaven and earth, and with Him who speaks in con- 
science at this hour, and who, from eternity to eter- 
nity, is our Saviour and our Lord. 

But, next, I want in my view of religion some- 
thing that will bring me into harmony with all exact 
research. I want no mysticism, no medievalism, 
no doctrine supported simply by the schools, or of 
doubtful worth under the microscope and the scalpel. 



300 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

I find it beyond controversy, as Theodore Parker 
held, that a Personal God is immanent in matter and 
mind. It is beyond all debate that there is a Holy 
Person revealed by the moral law. I want a God 
who shall be one in history, in external nature, and 
in my intuitions ; and I turn to Christianity, and I 
find a breadth of outlook more than equal to the 
loftiest philosophical demand. I read that He who is 
the light that lighteth every man that cometh into 
the world, that is, the Personal God who is revealed 
in conscience, is also He whose light shone in the 
darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not ; 
and who was in the world which was made by him, 
and the world knew him not. He who speaketh in 
the still small voice is he who spoke, and who yet 
speaks, as never man spoke. If we do not force 
upon the Scriptures our own narrowness of thought, 
we find that science and Scripture are agreed, for 
both make God perfect and one ; and, according to 
the Scriptures, the Holy Spirit is Christ's continued 
life. 

What are the great proofs in Scripture that God is 
presented to us as triunity in unity ? What are the 
great biblical proofs that God is triune ? What are 
a few of the tremorless bases of conviction that the 
Trinity is taught in the New Testament ? I hold, 
my friends, that it is a cheap reply to the assertion 
that the Trinity is taught in the New Testament, .to 
say that the word is not there. The word " Chris- 
tianity " is not there ; the word " Deity " is not 
there ; the word " humanity " is not there. The ques- 



OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATURE. 301 

tion is, whether it is not taught in the New Testa- 
ment that God is one. You say, Yes. If it be taught 
in the New Testament that God is one, and that 
each of the three subsistences is God, the Trinity 
is taught there implicitly, though not explicitly. 
After ages of debate, you know what nine out of 
ten of the devoutest and acutest think the New 
Testament teaches in the baptismal formula and the 
apostolical benediction, two incisive biblical summa- 
ries of Christian truth. The direction to the apos- 
tles as to baptism was, "Baptize all nations in the 
name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost," a Triune 
Name, no distinction being made between these three. 
So, too, the benediction was pronounced in the 
Triune Name : " May the love of God, the grace of 
the Lord Jesus Christ, and the communion of the 
Holy Ghost, be with you." You have been told that 
Neander says that there is not a passage in the New 
Testament which asserts the doctrine of the Trinity 
explicitly ; and Neander does say so : but he says a 
great deal more ; namely, that the whole New Testa- 
ment contains the doctrine implicitly. [Applause.] 

" In the doctrine of the Trinity," he writes, " God 
becomes known as Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, 
in which threefold relation the whole Christian 
knowledge of God is completely announced. Ac- 
cordingly all is herein embraced by the apostle Paul, 
when, in pronouncing the benediction, he sums up all 
in the formula, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the 
love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit. 
God as the living God, the God of mankind, and the 



302 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

God of the church, can be truly known in this way 
only. This shape of Theism presents the , perfect 
mean between the wholly extra-mundane God of 
deism and the God brought down into, and con- 
founded with, the world of pantheism. This mode 
of the knowledge of God belongs to the peculiar 
science of Theism and the Theocracy" (Neander, 
Hist, of the Chr. Rel. and Ch., Torrey's trans, i. 672). 

As many windows, gentlemen, as there are facts, let 
us use when we gaze on religious truths. Your mere 
theism shuts me up to one window. You will not 
let me look on all quarters of the sky. You shut 
your eyes to the light when you will not recognize 
what Napoleon saw in history. I want no pulpit that 
is not built on rendered reasons ; but I must be allowed 
to find reasons wherever they exist, whether the heavens 
stand or fall. 

Let research, with the four tests of intuition, 
instinct, experiment, and syllogism, have free course, 
and I am content. For fear that your conclusions 
may be a little broader than you like, you will not 
fail to gaze on the evidence which convinces Neander 
that the outcome of all looking into the Scriptures 
and into mere reason must be a belief in a Creator, 
in a Redeemer, and in a Sanctifier, the three one 
God, personal, omnipresent, and in conscience tangi- 
ble. 

When I thus use all my light, I am delivered from 
materialism ; when I thus look on God, I am deliv- 
ered from pantheism. 

Whoever searches the Bible in the spirit of those 



OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATURE. 303 

who wrote it, and of the martyrs, will be kept free 
from an utterly unscientific narrowness which feels 
that God in Christ was rather than that He is. We 
are not abreast of our privileges when we live always 
in Judaea. [Applause.] The Scriptures are a map of 
the universe, and not of Palestine merely. If we are 
full of their spirit, the wings of philosophy will tire 
us only by their tardiness, and narrow range of flight. 

There are in all ages, and particularly in this age 
of special studies, the most terrific dangers in a frag- 
mentary view of God. I want this doctrine of the 
Trinity to save me from fragmentariness of outlook 
upon the Divine Nature. I will not allow myself to 
see God merely in my intuitions, and shut up the 
windows of external nature and of history ; for thus 
I may easily drop down into pantheistic individu- 
alism, which, with supreme felicity of speech, your 
brave, broad, and massive Thomas Hill calls Egothe- 
ism. [Applause.] (See Hill, ex-president of Har- 
vard University, The Theology of the Sciences, 1877.) 

Neander says that the doctrine of the Trinity im- 
plies that of the Theocracy, or of a government of 
God in the universe and in national history. Remem- 
ber, gentlemen, that our fathers came here avowedly 
to found a Theocracy. What did that mean? A 
state of which natural law and revelation together, 
shining under, in, and about legislation, should be 
the masters ; a state where what can be known of 
God by reason on the one side, and revelation on the 
other, should lock its two hands around the neck of 
all vice, and throttle whatever would throttle the 



304 TKANSCENDENTALISM. 

Christian well-being of the poorest or the highest, 
and should thus build up in history a state fit to be 
called at once natural and God's own. When the 
Jesuits came to the mouth of the St. Lawrence, they 
intended to found a Theocracy. The great dream 
that lay behind Milton's and Cromwell's and Hamp- 
den's thoughts and deeds was, that human legislation 
should be a close copy of the divine and natural law. 
At the point of view to which exact research has now 
brought us, we must assert that the fact of the 
Divine Immanence in matter and mind makes the. 
world and nations a Theocracy ; and that politics and 
social life, no less than philosophy, must beware of 
fragmentary outlooks on the Divine Nature. Richter 
said, " He who was the Holiest among the mighty, 
and the Mightiest among the holy, has, with his 
pierced hand, lifted heathenism off its hinges, and 
turned the dolorous and accursed centuries into new 
channels, and now governs the ages." History, the 
illuminated garment of God; the church, Christ's 
Temple, — did you ever hear of the former in the 
name of science, or of the latter in the name of 
Christianity ? But to your Titanic Richter the two 
are one. De Tocqueville affirms anxiously that men 
never so much need to be theocratic as when they 
are the most democratic. Democracy will save itself 
by turning into a Theocracy, or ruin itself by not 
doing so. [Applause.] 

Transfigure society with Richter's thought. Satu- 
rate the centuries with the certainty of the Divine 
Personal Immanence in matter and mind. Do this, 



OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATURE. 305 

and, in the name of science itself, the laboring ages 
will slowly learn, not merely admiration, but adora- 
tion, of one God, incontrovertibly known in external 
nature, history, and conscience as Creator, as Re- 
deemer, as Sanctifier. When they touch the hem of 
the garment of a personal God thus apprehended, 
and never till then, will they be healed of the meas- 
ureless evils arising from fragmentariness of outlook 
upon the Divine Nature. Let the forehead of sci- 
ence, in the name of Christianity, bow down upon 
the moral law as the beloved disciple did upon our 
Lord's bosom. Let Richter lead; and a time will 
come when all clear thought, all political action, all 
individual growth, will call out : Glory be to God 
revealed in external nature ; glory be to God revealed 
in Christ and the church ; glory be to God revealed 
in Conscience ! To this secular voice the church 
will answer, in words which have already led eighteen 
centuries, and science will add at last her momentous 
acclaim ; Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, 
and to the Holy Ghost ; as it was in the beginning, 
is now, and ever shall be, world without end. 
[Applause.] 



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